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The article presents a profile of African American education consultant, poet and lecturer Melodye Micëre Van Putten. Topics cited include Van Putten's role as president and chief executive officer (CEO) of Black History Works Inc., her commitment to promote knowledge of Black culture and history through several programs including the Black History Workshops for Children (BHWC) and Rites of Passage and race consciousness poetry books she has written.

The article discusses the book "The Poetry of Robert Frost: The Collected Poems" edited by Edward Connery Lathem, focusing on an analysis of why lawyers should read the literary works created by Frost. Work-life balance and lawyering in America are mentioned, along with Frost's poems "A Passing Glimpse" and "The Tuft of Flowers." Pragmatism and a reported tension between life and law are examined, as well as issues such as aspiration and self-delusion.

The author reflects on Yiddish poets and poetry at the turn of the 20th century. The author mentions that many Jews between the assassination of Emperor of Russia Alexander II in 1881 and the beginning of the First World War in 1914 immigrated to the U.S. since they didn't consider any place in Europe as there home. The author quotes New York sociologist Robert Park on immigrant press documents in 1922. The author also explores the work done by poet Anna Margolin.

An essay is presented on the poetry of poet Anna Pauline Murray. It offers the life history of Murray and her contributions in poetry and polity that lead her to the position of saint in the U.S. Episcopal Church during the time that the country has been struggling for democracy. It mentions that the poem "Mr. Roosevelt Regrets" is one example of Murray's overtly political poems in which she highlighted anguish, disbelief, and possibility of equality.

The article discusses the piano composition "The Dying Poet," by Louis Moreau Gottschalk, first published in 1864. It examines sentimentality, autobiographical elements, and the imagery of reminiscence. The author comments on the contemporary dying poet archetype, examining this trope in two French poems entitled "Le Poète mourant," one by Charles-Hubert de Millevoye and the other by Alphonse de Lamartine, both first published in 1823. The contemporary context of the U.S. Civil War is also addressed.

An introduction to a series of articles about U.S. poetry during the time of crisis from 2000 to 2009 is presented, including one by Kaplan Harris on the response of New Narrative poets to acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), the concept of belatedness as poetry technique after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks by Ann Keniston, and another on the proliferation of poetic nationalism after the attacks by Juliana Spahr.

The article examines the interconnection between nationalism and U.S. poetry during the administration of former President George W. Bush and the role of government. It discusses the partnership between the National Endowment for the Arts and aircraft maker Boeing and controversies faced by Poetry Foundation president John Barr. In the author's view, poets during that time write not to unite citizens but for resistant activism. It also explores the influence of ethnicity and culture on poetry.

an interview with Afaa Michael Weaver, an American poet, editor, journalist, playwright, and translator is presented. A brief biography of Weaver is presented which discusses his position as a factory worker, his studies at Excelsior College and Brown University, and his works, including the poem "The Last Jazz Club" and the book "The Ten Lights of God." Weaver answers questions about his childhood in racially segregated Baltimore, Maryland and the relationship between poetry and place.

The article explores the editing and creative process of U.S. poet Walt Whitman. Emphasis is given to the Blue Book document and revisions made to the book "Leaves of Grass" in response to the Civil War and Whitman's experiences as a government clerk and visitor to wounded soldiers in hospitals. The author also considers the impact of the Blue Book on Whitman scholarship and criticism. Other topics include drafting letters for soldiers, scribal documents, and the influence of government work on poetry.

In the introduction to Quid 11: Three U.S. Poets (November 2002), Keston Sutherland wrote, “One considerable and vital task now facing U.S. poets … might be a confrontation with abstraction per se.” In the context of political poetry, this speaks to two important questions: first, how the individual is to be portrayed as a political subject by the avant-garde; second, what is the role of form in that portrayal? This essay will explore these questions through a detailed reading of Eléna Rivera's sequence Mistakes, Accidents, and a Want of Liberty (Barque Press, 2006). At first sight, Mistakes reads as a coded series of meditations in an associative order which give the reader the feeling of being abandoned into the text. However, Googling the opening poem's title, “thinking of my life, I almost forgot my liberty”, takes the reader straight to the nineteenth-century autobiography of slavery, escape and freedom The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845). This connects Rivera's sequence and the reader with one of the moments when a new type of individual-as-political-subject enters literature. An important part of Frederick Douglass's story involves learning to read and write at a time when slaves were forbidden to do so. In this context, Rivera is opening an argument about how the political subject is constructed and portrayed in language. We will argue, then, that through its intertextual relationship with The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and with other texts such as King Lear, Rivera's sequence offers revitalizing strategies not only for portraying the subject but for writing and reading politically. In this way, Mistakes, Accidents, and a Want of Liberty suggests ways of thinking, writing and reading outside what one poem calls “The limits … of ‘you’ as reflection, of ‘you’ as reaction”. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses American poet Muriel Rukeyser, her poems “Ajanta” and "Wake Island," as well as the crisis of American poetry in the 1940s and 1950s, focusing on issues associated with Rukeyser's writing career during the period. The essay entitled “Grandeur and Misery of a Poster Girl” which appeared as a poetry review in a 1943 issue of "Partisan review," as well as other contemporary criticisms of Rukeyser, are considered. Some of the subjects explored include Modernism, Americanism, World War II and literature, and the political aspects of mid-century American poetry.

The article considers the history and poetry of American woman poet Ruth Bryant, written during the American Revolution. At the start of the Revolution in 1775, Bryant was fifteen years old and living in North Bridgewater, Massachusetts. Some of her poems written between 1775 and 1783 considered include "An Address to the Sons of Liberty Written in the Year 1775" and "Heedless Youth," which the author compares to the writings of African American poet Phyllis Wheatley and American author Mercy Otis Warren. Other subjects are American women authors at the end of the eighteenth century, an overview of Bryant's life during the Revolution, and the experiences of children during the Revolution.

This essay examines Lorine Niedecker's poems about aging and menopause as a register of emerging discourses about menopause in post-WWII United States. Read through the lens of popular and medical articulations of and responses to the medicalization of female aging, Niedecker's poems demonstrate a critique of consumer-based power and the gendered tropes of American literary history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the Yiddish poetry series at the 92 Street Y in New York City in the 1960s by focusing on four of its organizers, participants and fictional chroniclers. The 92nd Street Y's Poetry Center's Yiddish and Hebrew Poetry Series ran from the 1962-1963 through the 1969-1970 season, and featured more than thirty Yiddish poets, as well as a handful who wrote in Hebrew, including Yiddish/Hebrew bilingual poets. Thanks to the fact that the 92 Street Y recorded these events, the Yiddish poetry series offers an aural portrait of secular Yiddish culture in America during the 1960s, when most of the great Yiddish poets were still alive. The material discussed contributes to the mapping of literary multilingualism in America during the period of radical cultural changes and aesthetic shifts that took place in New York in the 1960s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 1920s saw the debut of a considerable number of female poets writing in Yiddish in Europe and the United States of America. This article briefly considers the emergence of modern Yiddish women's poetry, and the importance of Ezra Korman's Yidishe dikhterins, an anthology of their work published in Chicago in 1928, before turning to one of the poets represented there, Rokhl H. Korn. The article considers her unusual family background and upbringing on a farm in rural Poland, which fostered the development of her poetic talent. Through analysis of several significant poems, the character of her early work is revealed: a combination of deep empathy with the natural world, free expression of female sexuality, and a sensitive evocation of the lives and emotions of the people of her childhood village, both Poles and Jews. Her later poetry incorporates the Holocaust and the pain of exile, but the more controlled work of her maturity is rooted in the rich and passionate poetry of her youth. One of the leading female Yiddish lyric poets of the 20th century, Korn exemplifies the freedom to express individual creativity and female sensibility which women writers in Yiddish discovered in the inter-war years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents an interview with African-American poet Marilyn Nelson. She discusses her family members, commenting on their influence on her writings, her father's military service as a Tuskegee Airman, and her mother's career as a teacher. Nelson also explores her book "The Cachoeira Tales and Other Poems," focusing on the influence of the collection of stories "The Canterbury Tales" by Geoffrey Chaucer. Several of Nelson's other works are examined including the book "Carver: A Life in Poems."

An interview with Barbara Chase-Riboud, an African American novelist, poet and sculptor, is presented. Chase-Riboud says that when she was 11 years old she was accused of plagiarism and because of this she stopped writing. She talks about her time at the Yale University in New Haven Connecticut, where she finished a Master of Fine Arts. She also mentions the reasons behind writing about issues, including dominative power, sex and strategic submissions in her novels.

The article focuses on 19th-century New England poet Emily Dickinson and her teenage angst over religion. An 1850 letter written by Dickinson's best friend Abby Maria Wood portrays Dickinson's feeling regarding the Congregational Church's Revival of 1850 in Amherst, Massachusetts. The author explains Calvinist doctrines of the Congregational Church during the period including salvation by grace, predestination, election, and original sin. The author also discusses the influence the essay "The Poet," by Ralph Waldo Emerson, had upon Dickinson's imagination.

The article presents a statement from poet and literary critic Charles Bernstein in the U.S. Accordingly, Bernstein abandoned his false opinion that National Poetry Month is not good for poetry and for poets. He abjures and detest the aforementioned error and apostasy. He also asks for an apology for expressing that only elitist and obscure poetry should be praised. Moreover, he stresses out that he now freely and openly attest to the virtues of National Poetry Month in throwing a national spotlight on poetry, and agrees that the best way to get general readers to start to read poetry is to present them with broadly appealing work, with strong emotional content and a clear narrative line.

This essay examines the place of novelist and poet Samuel Woodworth in American literary history and in the construction of national identity in the U.S. His concern for the nation is exemplified in the allegorical ending in the novel "The Champions of Freedom," in which concerns and anxieties about the nation interact with the traditional story of patriotic herorism. The author argues that such contribution of Woodworth was relegated in the periphery of literary history because his texts were misread as poorly plotted narratives.

Presents an interview with Myung Mi Kim, a Korean-American poet who often writes of the immigrant experience in the United States. She argues that poetry has a unique ability to engage with social issues. She also describes her writing process and how it has changed since her first book, "Under Flag."

The article examines the book "For Democracy, Workers, and God: Labor Song-Poems and Labor Protest, 1865-1895," by Clark D. Halker. Halker made a remark in his assessment of postbellum working class poetry and song, that a historian would have been laughed out of the profession for proposing a study of song-poetry. The book was reviewed in journals of history, folklore and music, but did not cross the disciplinary boundary into American literature studies. It is claimed that Halker's study has contributions to related histories of the American working class, Gilded Age and genre of poetry.

The article offers the author's opinion on the poetic style of U.S.-based poet Paul Muldoon. The author opines that Muldoon is a poet who puts the idea of poetic responsibility to an extreme test in a consistent way. He critically analyzes his work and says that his work is difficult, opaque and enigmatic. He also refers to several of his books including "Horse Latitudes" and "Aesthetic Theory". In "Aesthetic Theory" Adorno says that all art is enigmatic because it determines indeterminate.

The article presents an analysis of Charles Bernstein's article concerning the second-wave of modernist poetry and lyrics in the U.S. It is noted that the change of modernist poetry could be attributed to the canonical expansion in the American literature. It argues that modernist poetry appears closer to the vision of a sprawling epic collage poem of innovative and traditional poetry of Bernstein. It emphasizes the modernism of vernacular musical genres. Underestimating the significance of the term modernist would be easy.

The article focuses on the contrast and conflict between the modernist poetry and lyrics in the U.S. The proliferation of new styles in the first decades of the twentieth century interest in the context of more traditional styles. The reversal of fortune for many poetic forms and styles is considered as one of the elements of this period. One of its primary sites of poetic invention involved novel ways of alphabetically representing or refusing accentuated speech. The innovations of assimilation and disruption are compelling in the second-wave modernists, poets and comics.

This article pays homage to African American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar's foundational works in producing illustrated books of poetry. Dunbar published six books of poetry in African American dialect, illustrated with photographs, positioning text and images with nearly equivalent emphasis. The photo books contributed much to Dunbar's lifework and to U.S. cultural history than scholars had thought. Although the Dunbar books did not pioneer the photograph and poetry form, they made the form a lasting convention in African American letters.

This article discusses the works of British poet Geoffrey Hill in the U.S. Hill, as cited, has been interested in Christian mysticism and has written impassioned poems placing utopian ideals with the history of fear, suffering and violent death. He was too embroiled in questions concerning religious belief and was too engaged with the violent history of Christianity. Hill believes that false mystical experiences developed from the deluded belief that personal imperfections had been transcended.

This article discusses a study which offers a small piece of bibliographical and historical research on African American women poets who published their works in the pre-20th-century in the U.S. It introduces 35 black women who published poetry in the "Christian Recorder" newspaper between 1855 and 1865. It is stated that the poets seem to have drawn explicitly or implicitly on their own life experiences as a content-base for their public acts of publishing poems.

America's encounter with Japan took place not only in Japan from 1854 onward but also in the United States itself, as signaled by the visit of a Japanese embassy to the American east and west coasts during the summer of 1860-a trip that Walt Whitman famously profiled in his poem "A Broadway Pageant." This article discusses the contexts for this encounter of civilizations on American soil by examining the events of the visit itself and Whitman's responses to it. In doing so, the article comments on American perceptions of Japan and also analyzes the power relationships at work in the encounter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents an interview with Puerto Rican poet Tato Laviera. When asked about musical influences for his work, he remembers the rhythm of a black group called Cortijo y su Combo when he was a boy. Laviera comments on the black movement in Puerto Rico and how it transformed language. Laviera also mentions the portrayal of female characters as one of the more important aspects of his poetry. When asked about the definite identity of his work, the poet emphasizes respect for the word.

The article presents an interview with poet Luisa A. Igloria. She mentions her influences in writing poetry. She cites her reasons for changing the first name and initials she uses in writing book-length publications. She explores the differences between the literary scheme in the Philippines and in the United States.

In his 1983 essay Reflexions on Exile, the cultural critic Edward Said defines exiles in the broadest sense as people who are prevented from returning to their land. He also argues that the displacement experienced by exiles in the foreign land calls for a reconstruction of their historical past as a way to find a common ground where they can identify as a group, overcoming their solitude. Although Puerto Ricans in the United States are émigrés rather than ostracized people, several conditions, such as the massiveness of the Diaspora launched with Operation Bootstrap, and the social and racial discrimination faced by Puerto Ricans in the metropolis made of this experience one marked by the trauma of social displacement. This article examines the Nuyorican artistic movement of the sixties and seventies as an attempt to reconstruct that fragmented history that Said identifies as intrinsic to the exile. I will argue that some common elements that surface in the art-production of El Taller Boricua, and the Nuyorican Poets, such as the use of Taíno and African imagery, the critique of the Spanish colonization in Puerto Rico, the reference to social displacement, and the subversion of artistic conventions function together to create an "aesthetics of the Puerto Rican exile." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Compares the notions of terrorism of 19th century German poet Friedrich Hölderlin and the ideas of homeland security in response to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in the U.S. Impact of the terrorist attacks and the institution of homeland security on the anticipation of future terrorism; Legacy of Hölderlin to the German national consciousness; Interpretation of the Hölderlin's notion of homeland in "Heimkunft: An die Verwandten"; Notions of terrorism in various works of Hölderlin.

Explores American Renaissance poetry and the topos of positionality in the works of William Gilmore Simms and Walt Whitman. Effort to renew critical attention to Simms; Publication of Simms' "Poems: Descriptive, Dramatic, Legendary, and Contemplative" in 1853 and its proximity to the 1855 publication date of Whitman's "Leaves of Grass"; Eclipse of Simms by Whitman; Whitman's populist declaration that the proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it; Whitman's affectionate absorption of his country that made his work particularly relevant; Presentation of Whitman's poetry as a kind of "policy" for preserving union; Whitman's formulation of a universal 'conjunctive principle' whose manifest structure is the sequence of end-stopped, nonequivalent, but equipollent lines; Reason the U.S. absorbs Whitman rather than Simms; Poetry's social policy than its literary quality.

Discusses the work of Los Angeles, California-based spoken word artist Marisa Norte. Poetry based on bus experiences; Character of the Los Angeles portrayed by Norte in her work; Metaphor of two worlds in social policy; Challenges faced by minorities.

The figure of the American Indian was a central motif and preoccupation for the immigrant Hebrew poets in the United States. Many critics date the beginnings of an estimable Hebrew literature in the United States to the publication of Benjamin Nahum Silkiner's Indian epic "Mul ohel Timmura" (1910). Using the figure of the Indian, these poets could claim the mantle of Americanness through Romantic and pastoral nature poetry while avoiding the modern, urban American landscape that they found alienating and aesthetically difficult to render. The Indian was also an object of dark fascination for a group of poets desperately concerned with the possibility of Jewish national and cultural survival in modernity. Significantly, they tended to focus on dying tribes, on the crisis of cultural continuity, and on the predations of Christian antisemitism. These poets created a body of work that reflected and refracted Jewish experience—including Zionism and contemporary events in Palestine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses "In the Mecca," Gwendolyn Brooks' last collection of poetry to be published by a mainstream press and the first to come out of her conversion to the Black Arts Movement. Argument that Brooks' political alignment reduces neither the aesthetic merit of her later poetry nor its social value beyond the Black community; Exhibition of conceptual orientation that is essential to Black feminist thought; Conditions of Brooks' literary production and reception; Ways in which a politics of location is intrinsic to Brooks' spatial poetics; Juxtapositional reading of the prophetic word in Brooks' poetry.

Many American artists, writers, and filmmakers portrayed enlisted men returning at the end of World War II. It is surprising, however, to see how this gloom and trauma permeate the work of two unlikely figures: Robert Frost and Norman Rockwell. Frost, the poet of Vermont themes, did his best to avoid writing about the war, but his great poem "Directive," about a somber return home, is powerfully linked to 1945, the time in which it was written. Frost and Rockwell, both Vermont residents, did not know one another, and their aesthetic aims were not the same: Rockwell painted propaganda and Frost did his best to steer clear of propagandistic themes. Frost wrote "Directive" when he was seventy-one, and he published it in book form in Steeple Bush, his eighth volume of poetry. INSET: "Directive" by Robert Frost.

Looks into the depiction of the U.S. as reflected in the poetry of Mozambican poet José Craveirinha. Career history of Craveirinha; Assessment of several poems of Craveirinha on the U.S.; Detection of the reflection of Craveirinha of the U.S. as what the country signified for him and for his country; Reason for the interest of Craveirinha in the U.S.