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Theoretically, a poem can begin in any way. What does it mean that in practice, poems often begin in a particular way—that is, by returning to a fragment of some prior thing? We see this in the encore of John Milton's opening to Lycidas ('Yet once more, O ye laurels, and once more'); differently, we see this in the widely used convention of the poetic epigraph (for instance, T. S. Eliot's 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' begins with six lines from Dante's Inferno). While there is an established model for understanding the beginning as an act that invokes poetic precedent, this paper seeks to expose the beginning's logic of return to a broader sense of language that is beyond the remit of poetic tradition as such. With a focus on the epigraph, this paper thinks about the everyday existence of poems and about how this existence relates to ordinary language, asking, how do these different modes of language function together? How does ordinary language collude in the creation of poetry? In its enactment of the passage of language from one mode of existence to another, the beginning of a poem might offer some answers to these questions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

De Laudibus Sanctae Crucis (DLSC) by Hrabanus Maurus is a seminal work in the medieval Christian literature that explores the Cross as the central structure of the universe through a unique amalgamation of poetry, prose, and visual art. The work employs a multi-layered narrative that enriches the reader's understanding, encouraging a meditative interaction with the text that emphasizes the contemplative over the recitative. This paper analyzes Hrabanus's intricate use of verbal and visual elements to guide his readers into a profound meditation on the universal significance of the Cross. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I hope to cast light on Wittgenstein enigmatic remark, "one should really only create philosophy poetically". I discuss Wittgenstein's ambition to overcome metaphysics by way of an appeal to ordinary language. For this purpose I contrast "realism" in philosophy (i.e., metaphysical realism, particularly its modern scientific version) with "realism" in poetry. My theme is the capacity of poetry to provide a model for Wittgenstein's resistance to the inhumanity unleashed in metaphysics—exemplified by two distinct forms of skepticism—which obliterates the ordinary world under the guise of discovering its true nature. The poem I shall use to illustrate the difficulty in maintaining our grip on reality, hence our grip on our humanity, is Czeslaw Milosz's poem "Realism". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper highlights the limitations of narrative logic in mental health care, and in particular of "narrative vigilance"—the tendency to watch over experience via narrativisation, and to tether the concrete particulars of experience to the hypothetical structure of a narrative signification. Narrative logic is grounded in hypotaxis—the syntactic structuring whereby a discourse is characterised by different levels of subordination using linking words that connect, especially in terms of temporal and explanatory consequentiality. I offer an alternative approach based on parataxis—the practice of placing phrases or parts of speech next to each other without subordinating conjunctions. Sentences are juxtaposed without a clear connection; the contrast may generate novel and unexpected combinations between these dissimilar fragments. After distinguishing between parataxis and psychopathological phenomena like disturbances of association, I take inspiration from the work and life of a poet, Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843), considered among the greatest. He suffered for half his life from a severe form of mental illness that would perhaps, today, be diagnosed as schizophrenia. In the poems written during his illness, hypotaxis and narrative vigilance seem to blur, and parataxis takes centre stage. The fading of narrative structure in no way coincides with the absence of meaningfulness. Rather, meaningfulness is left to parataxis itself, that is, to the recombining power of words, sentences, and images. Parataxis itself can provide meaningfulness or, at least, provide the soil in which it can germinate. The void of narration opens the door for the fullness of "emergent" connections. In the final part of the paper, with the help of Freud's ideas on the relationship between "analysis" and "synthesis" in psychoanalytic treatment, some implications are derived about the relevance of parataxis to the logics of discovery in psychotherapeutic care, especially that of persons with severe mental conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two major poets of the Russian Neo-Avant-Garde—Gennady Aygi and Elizaveta Mnatsakanova—created textual works that transgressed the limits of language and the borders between the arts. Each pursued their own method of the visualization and musicalization of verbal matter, yet both share a particular musical sensibility, which guarantees the integrity of the linguistic structure of their verse, despite the fragmentation and logical incoherence of its elements. The atonal (serial) musical tradition has a special significance for these experimental poetics of minimalism. Mnatsakanova, herself a musicologist, who was friends with Dmitri Shostakovich, not only used the techniques of contemporary music composition in her visual and sound poetry, but also collaborated with electronic musicians in her recorded poetry performances. Aygi experimented with language, not only crossing the boundaries between music and poetry, but also between sound and silence. For him, music was a way of expressing pre-verbal subjectivity and reproducing signs of meaning that are hidden from ordinary perception. In his poems, Aygi brought together Chuvash folk music with experimental techniques of minimalism, correlating his own work with such Soviet unofficial composers as Andrey Volkonsky and Sofia Gubaidulina. This paper will address the issues of transmutation between verbal, visual, and sound art in poetic minimalism of the Soviet-era underground. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I propose to examine several poems by Elizabeth Bishop through the prism of the concept of letter delineated in "Lituraterre", where Lacan explores the connection between the literal and the littoral in order to draw a key distinction between signifiers which are the semblances involved in ordinary communication, and the letter as a precipitate resulting from their breakdown. Insofar as the letter causes "writing effects that are structured around moments of vacillation of semblances" (M-H Roche), such effects may be traced in poems where Bishop focuses on how meaning is set adrift by eliding, displacing or transforming graphemes and phonemes. Her observation that "the names of seashore towns run out to sea" points to the littoral/liminal space of the poetic signifier that straddles enjoyment and meaning. I analyze Bishop's painterly treatment of mist through the prism of Lacan's discussion of Japanese calligraphy where the unary brush stroke, which "is the means to clear original Chaos" (E. Laurent), operates as the equivalent of the median void, often represented by fog in Chinese painting, i.e., as an avatar of the littoral that separates knowledge from enjoyment. I conclude with a reading of a poem where the semiosis of mortality hinges on the (dis-)appearance of certain phonemes, inviting us to question the literal/literary destiny of letters when they turn into Joycean litter, and prompting us to revisit Lacan's familiar aphorism that "a letter always reaches its destination". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is about poetry and pilgrimage in Tembilahan, Indragiri Hilir, where Abdurrahman Siddiq, a prominent alim who lived in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, is buried. In addition to his treatises on theology, mysticism, and ethics, Abdurrahman Siddiq is also renowned for his contribution to Islamic literature in Sumatra. He is a famous Islamic scholar and is respected in Indragiri Hilir for his spiritual messages delivered in the form of sya'ir (poetry). Malay Muslims have preserved the saint's legacy through the act of pilgrimage and various cultural events and festivals. This paper argues that the recitation of Abdurrahman Siddiq's poems during the pilgrimage to Tembilahan and Islamic festivals shows how Malay Muslims honor their respected saint. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the study of the author's style of A.S. Pushkin based on the comparison of his poetic texts with the texts of contemporary poets. The purpose of this study is to determine the features of the author's style of A.S. Pushkin using machine learning methods. This paper describes the construction of several classifications based on different groups of features, as well as the classification based on a combined set of features from different groups. The quality of all constructed classifications is also analyzed; special attention is paid to the interpretation of the neural network solution and the identification of features of the author's style. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Krystyna Miłobędzka (born 1932) is one of the most interesting and unique phenomena of the Polish poetry scene of the 20th and 21st centuries. Two characteristics of her poetry, the visual character of her many poems and her preoccupation with the concept of the garden-world, are worth a closer look. Miłobędzka's poetry refers to the topoï of the garden-world in single poems and cycles of poetic texts. Her hortus mirabilis, inserts itself into the sphere of the metaphysical reflection of nature, giving Miłobędzka's poetry a specific dynamic in which the "I"—the gardener—has a significant role as an observer, and as a creator of entities. The activity of looking, which happens, in fact, in all types of verbs and aspects, is in this specific sphere (look, watch, see), fundamental to defining oneself in the world and the world's relationship to oneself. In this perspective, the image of the garden from childhood, is confronted by a necessary new visualization. The temporal aspect of the garden is at the center of existence, in the cyclical return of nature's laws of rebirth and death, which are relevant to the personal, singular perspective of the end in many of Miłobędzka's volumes. In Anaglify (Anaglyphs), some poems particularly fit the issue of visuality in poetry, not only at the conceptual level, the place granted to observation, the poet-particular observer, but the poem itself. They are conceived as graphic and pictorial realizations. Poems from the volume dwanaście wierszy w kolorze (twelve poems in color) or wszystkowiersze (omnipoems) are special cases of these. The selected words are conceived in color, and their arrangement on the space of the page has meaning. The parallel between looking and writing, which Miłobędzka consistently uses in her writing method and poetically admits, is also very important. Although her poetic diction alludes to historical avant-garde and linguistic poetry achievements, her lyrical savoir-faire is characterized by a certain new minimalist construction and a separate, recognizable style. Miłobędzka's innovativeness lies in combining seemingly distant and sometimes poetically opposite categories: full, ambiguous image-in-poem and asceticism by means of expression, such as a minimal number of words. Her poetry is deeply rooted in perceiving, seeing, watching, and contemplating the world—faithful to its physicality but also open to the most essential questions of philosophy asking about existence and its limits. This new visibility of elements is reflected in authentic poetic delight and in the "visualizing" form, where the poem also becomes an image on the plane of a sheet of paper or becoming one side of the house wall as a mural poem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current paper explores the potential of the areas between mathematics and poetry. We will first recall some definitions and results that are needed to construct solutions of the Yang–Baxter equation. A new duality principle is presented and Boolean coalgebras are introduced. A section on poetry dedicated to the Yang–Baxter equation is presented, and a discussion on a poem related to a mathematical formula follows. The final section presents our conclusions and further information on these topics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Autologous stem cell transplantation (ASCT) is a good option in fit young patients affected by POEMS syndrome. Few data are published on how to treat these patients in case of relapse. In this paper we described our two patients who underwent a second ASCT. From our experience, we can confirm that a second transplant is a real treatment option with good results and limited side effects. It provided excellent response and long-term disease-free survival in POEMS patients who relapsed after a first transplant, including late relapses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kia ora e hoa, wishing wellness and vitality, to you, dear friend. This piece is a window into the realities of being a fat Māori girl and woman. It offers insights into the sense making, intimacies, and intricacies of being a fat Māori girl, and now woman. This piece is whakapapa, the layering of genealogy, of thought, of realities, of experiences, of identities. It offers a glimpse into a time of whakapapa, of how I have made sense of my world in my many identities. Here, I share poems written throughout my research journey and my relationship navigating insider-research, being embedded in the research, being the research, and the ways in which I actualize Kaupapa Māori research. This piece opens with a karakia, a spiritual offering of safety, of welcome, and starts with the poem When I was, sharing moments and memories from ages 5 to 33. It then transitions to the poem When I am, a poem of potential, which connects back with the atua Hinenuitepō, a powerful ancestor and wahine deity, as well as her stories, transitions, and Kaupapa that she has shared with me, so that I may make sense of the world and this Kaupapa, the ways she has guided me on my journey. It then ends with a karakia, a spiritual offering of safety and cleansing, a farewell, to you e hoa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Celan's poetry is deemed universal and experimental, and its main characteristic is to "explore possibilities of sense-making". His poetry is also acknowledged to be the apex of Jewish post-Holocaust poetry, contending with existentialist questions such as the existence God in the Holocaust and the possibility of restoring Jewish identity. In this paper I will examine how Celan uses paradoxes in his poetry to create atheistic and skeptical expressions. The technique of paradox expresses the concurrent existence of two contradictory possibilities; the article will present three types of paradox typical of Celan's poetry: (1) the affirmation and denial of the existence of God; (2) the mention of rituals from Jewish tradition, while voiding them of their conventional meaning; (3) the use of German, specifically, for the reconstitution of Jewish identity. My main argument is that paradox in Celan's work creates a unique voice of atheism and skepticism, since it preserves the ideas that it rejects as a source for fashioning meaning. In order to explore how Celan constructs paradox, I will use Wittgenstein's resolutions of the paradoxes that emerge from the use of language, and I will show how they illuminate Celan's use of this technique. The article will examine three Wittgensteinian methods of resolving the paradoxes that Celan employs in his oeuvre: highlighting, containing, and dissolving. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigated co-constructed research poetry as a way to understand the lived experiences of people affected by rarer dementia and as a means to use poetry to convey those experiences to healthcare professionals. Using mixed methods, 71 people living with rarer dementia and care-partners (stakeholders) contributed to co-constructing 27 poems with professional poets; stakeholders' verbatim words were analysed with descriptive qualitative analysis. Stakeholders were also surveyed and interviewed about their participation. Healthcare professionals (n = 93) were surveyed to elicit their responses to learning through poetry and its acceptability as a learning tool. Poems conveyed a shared narrative of different aspects of lived experience, often owing to atypical symptoms, misunderstandings by professionals, lack of support pathways, and a continuous struggle to adapt. Stakeholder surveys indicated it was a valuable experience to both co-create and respond to the poems, whilst group interviews revealed people's experiences of the research poetry were characterised by reflection on lived experience, curiosity and exploration. Healthcare professionals' responses reinforced poetry's capacity to stimulate cognitive and affective learning specific to rare dementia support and prompt both empathy and critical thinking in practice. As the largest poetry-based study that we are aware of, this novel accessible approach of creating group poems yielded substantial information about the experiences and needs of those affected by rarer dementia and how poetry can contribute to healthcare education and training. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spain possesses a vast number of poems. Most have features that mean they present significantly different styles. A superficial reading of these poems may confuse readers due to their complexity. Therefore, it is of vital importance to classify the style of the poems in advance. Currently, poetry classification studies are mostly carried out manually, which creates extremely high requirements for the professional quality of classifiers and consumes a large amount of time. Furthermore, the objectivity of the classification cannot be guaranteed because of the influence of the classifier's subjectivity. To solve these problems, a Spanish poetry classification framework was designed using artificial intelligence technology, which improves the accuracy, efficiency, and objectivity of classification. First, an artificial-intelligence-driven Spanish poetry classification framework is described in detail, and is illustrated by a framework diagram to clearly represent each step in the process. The framework includes many algorithms and models, such as the Term Frequency–Inverse Document Frequency (TF_IDF), Bagging, Support Vector Machines (SVMs), Adaptive Boosting (AdaBoost), logistic regression (LR), Gradient Boosting Decision Trees (GBDT), LightGBM (LGB), eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost), and Random Forest (RF). The roles of each algorithm in the framework are clearly defined. Finally, experiments were performed for model selection, comparing the results of these algorithms.The Bagging model stood out for its high accuracy, and the experimental results showed that the proposed framework can help researchers carry out poetry research work more efficiently, accurately, and objectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper takes up the question of secrecy and sovereignty in Derrida's final seminar on The Beast and the Sovereign. Focusing primarily on Derrida's readings of Lacan and Celan in Volume I, it argues that, for Derrida, we should distinguish between the lie (or what Lacan calls 'trickery' or 'feigning feint'), and the secret (or what Celan calls 'the secret of an encounter'), and understand the sense in which the former implies an intentional and sovereign human subject, while the latter represents a limit to such a thing, and, arguably, to the concept of sovereignty as such. This explains, or helps explain, why, in his discussions of sovereignty, Derrida spends so much time examining the animal, on the one hand, and poetry, on the other. For, on his account, these both configure secrecy, and specifically what I refer to as the absolute secret. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In The Beast and the Sovereign v.1, Derrida argues that classical sovereignty is linked to the performative act of declaring oneself master. Thus, each sovereign asserts a distinction between the masterful self and the mastered other. Derrida contends that the sovereign distinction between self and other maps onto a distinction between sovereign autonomy and a mechanical determination said to characterize others of all kinds. This gives rise to a differentiated binary between responsibility, capacity and restraint on the one side against reaction, instinct and danger on the other, which, Derrida suggests, operates across traditional separations, such as man/animal, man/machine, mind/body and, of course, sovereign and beast. This paper argues that Derrida's reading of Paul Celan and Georges Bataille may be understood as a pursuit of an alternative sovereignty. This alternative sovereignty would be without mastery and its binaries. I suggest that Derrida finds such an alternative sovereignty in the "majesty" of poetry, which, in his own poetic gesture, allows him to upset traditional distinctions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article looks at a set of anglophone form poetry that I wrote for a course I took while pursuing my master's degree in Gender Studies at Ambedkar University, Delhi (2019–2021), during the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in India. The poems are a documentation of the life that I lived and experienced during this time. Using an auto-ethnographic method, this article simultaneously engages with poetic forms, such as the haiku, villanelle, sestina, and acrostic, and provides a self-reflexive analysis of the content and the South Asian context from which the poems emerged. Each poem, I argue, grapples with various gendered structures of interpersonal and state violence, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdown that followed in its wake. In this article, I explore the ways in which the everydayness of violence can be documented through art and creative practices. My primary question is: What is the form of the poem doing for the content of the poem; that is, in what ways do certain poetic forms assist in the documentation of personal experiences of violence during a pandemic? This article explores the political possibilities offered by the method of writing form poetry as a documentation of violence, as well as providing a 'witness' to it. Thinking more about the role of producing art vis-à-vis my academic research, I further ask: How can we expand the scope of the feminist research methods we use, and what role might form poetry play in this? I situate this article at the intersection of South Asian Studies, Women's and Gender Studies, and Literary and Cultural Studies, particularly focusing on the South Asian anglophone poetics of the written word in a post-pandemic time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Poetic devices implicitly work towards inducing the reader to associate intended and expressed meaning to the sounds of the poem. In turn, sounds may be organized a priori into categories and assigned presumed meaning as suggested by traditional literary studies. To compute the degree of harmony and disharmony, I have automatically extracted the sound grids of all the sonnets by William Shakespeare and have combined them with the themes expressed by their contents. In a first experiment, sounds have been associated with lexically and semantically based sentiment analysis, obtaining an 80% of agreement. In a second experiment, sentiment analysis has been substituted by Appraisal Theory, thus obtaining a more fine-grained interpretation that combines dis-harmony with irony. The computation for Francis Webb is based on his most popular 100 poems and combines automatic semantically and lexically based sentiment analysis with sound grids. The results produce visual maps that clearly separate poems into three clusters: negative harmony, positive harmony and disharmony, where the latter instantiates the need by the poet to encompass the opposites in a desperate attempt to reconcile them. Shakespeare and Webb have been chosen to prove the applicability of the method proposed in general contexts of poetry, exhibiting the widest possible gap at all linguistic and poetic levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Poetry is an ideal tool to convey participant voices in social research as it compresses the meaning and essence of participant narratives through using evocative sensory words that illuminate nuances of lived experience. Expressive poetics is an emerging arts-based research method that facilitates a multi-sensory and relational analytical process. In this article, the authors describe and illustrate an adapted expressive poetics research method through highlighting the experiences of Two Spirit, lesbian, gay, transgender, or queer (2SLGBTQ) Indigenous youth that participated in a culture-centered HIV prevention curriculum. It is our hope that through creating dialogic poems, we deepen and nuance the salient experiences of participant youth, acknowledge our relationship through adding our creative response to their calls for care, and create a model for others to engage in a similar process. In a time when 2SLGBTQ bodies are increasingly targeted and policed, it is more important than ever to center and amplify these voices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to show the presence of religion and the particular evolution of lyrical matrixes connected to religion in the Polish poems of female poets. There is a particular presence of women in the roots of the Polish literary and lyrical traditions. For centuries, the image of a woman with a pen in her hand was one of the most important imponderabilia. Until the 19th century, Polish female poets continued to be rare. Where female poets do appear in the historical record, they are linked to institutions such as monasteries, where female intellectuals were able to find relative liberty and a refuge. Many of the poetic forms they used in the 16th, late 17th, and 18th centuries were typically male in origin and followed established models. In the 19th century, the specific image of the mother as a link to the religious portrait of the Madonna and the Mother of God (the first Polish poem presents Bogurodzica, the Virgin Mary, the Mother of Jesus) reinforces women's new presence. From Adam Mickiewicz's poem Do matki Polki (To Polish Mother), the term "Polish mother" becomes a separate literary, epistemological, and sociological category. Throughout the 20th century (with some exceptions), the impact of Romanticism and its poetical and religious models remained alive, even if they underwent some modifications. The period of communism, as during the Period of Partitions and the Second World War, privileged established models of lyric, where the image of women reproduced Romantic schema in poetics from the 19th-century canons, which are linked to religion. Religious poetry is the domain of few female author-poets who look for inner freedom and religious engagement (Anna Kamieńska) or for whom religion becomes a form of therapy in a bodily illness (Joanna Pollakówna). This, however, does not constitute an otherness or specificity of the "feminine" in relation to male models. Poets not interested in reproducing the established roles reach for the second type of lyrical expression: replacing the "mother" with the "lover" and "the priestess of love" (the Sappho model) present in the poetry of Maria Pawlikowska-Jasnorzewska. In the 20th century, the "religion" of love in women's work distances them from the problems of the poetry engaged in social and religious disputes and constitutes a return to pagan rituals (Hymn idolatrous of Halina Poświatowska) or to the carnality of the body, not necessarily overcoming previous aesthetic ideals (Anna Świrszczyńska). It is only since the 21st century that the lyrical forms of Polish female poets have significantly changed. They are linked to the new place of the Catholic Church in Poland and the new roles of Polish women in society. Four particular models are analysed in this study, which are shown through examples of the poetry of Genowefa Jakubowska-Fijałkowska, Justyna Bargielska, Anna Augustyniak, and Malina Prześluga with the Witches' Choir. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The birth of modern aesthetics cannot be separated from the emergence of a new, non-dogmatic conception of religion and theology. Friedrich Schlegel advocated 'art as new religion' while Friedrich Schleiermacher developed a vision on religion as a deeply aesthetic experience. In this rich intellectual context, one author stands out as deeply steeped in this field of innovative dialogues between philosophy, religion and art (against the backdrop of profound historical transformations) and as a singular figure beckoning towards a future (and a future language) that was still to come: Friedrich Hölderlin. In his later work, Hölderlin's poetic voice retreats into a process of meticulous reading and writing, a complex score of traces and signs that articulate difference, not-yet-presence and potentiality, which is nothing other than the experience of finite time. In doing so, Hölderlin retraces the divine in history and in human existence: its retreat and expected arrival. In this article, we present readings and interpretations of Hölderlin's later poetry, with a specific focus on the Winke or hints of the gods, and the vocabulary of nods and signs (Zeichen) signifying the experience of time's passing as the announcement of an unthinkable future. By involving Jean-Luc Nancy's rethinking of the Winke as intersections of the divinity of humanity and the humanity of divinity, we will arrive at a new understanding of Hölderlin's emblematic figures of modernity: the stranger and the passer-by as receivers and transmitters of these Winke. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My recent research on an early female bhakti saint brought to the fore differences between her perspective as represented in poetry attributed to her and her medieval biographer's representation of her concerns. Through that study, the widespread academic use in recent scholarship of traditional biographies to interpret female bhakti saints became especially visible and problematic to me. In this experimental essay, I consider what patterns we might find if we prioritize the poetry attributed to influential female bhakti saints, navigating the significant issues of subjectivity, voice, and utterance to discern the contours of their devotional subjectivity as an authoritative nexus for conceptualizing and expressing individual and group devotion. In contrast to scholarly assurances that female bhakti saints are internally steadfast or that they are mainly troubled by external situations, I argue that their devotional subjectivity voices their realization that diverse embodied experiences of contestation are generative for a shared sense of devotion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although emotions occupy an important place in Alevism, their representation in Alevi history and the present has not yet been sufficiently researched. This study addresses this desideratum and discusses the representation and codification of emotions on the basis of central representatives of Alevi poetry. The focus of this study is the conjunction of constitutive teachings with basic emotions. In the poems, religious beliefs that are considered constitutive are explicitly linked to emotions such as love, grief and anger. In this way, central beliefs become emotionally charged and correspondingly more accentuated. At the same time, the poems convey an emotional expectation to the target audience: various rhetorical stylistic devices are used to convey to the addressees how they should react emotionally to certain ideas, memories and beliefs. In this way, these emotions fulfil the function of feeling rules that must be observed in order to be part of the collective. The analysis of Alevi poetry suggests that emotions have been an important factor in the history of Alevism for social order, group formation and religio-cultural demarcation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the year 1021 CE, blind author and skeptic Abū l-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī (d. 1057 CE) wrote Risālat al-ṣāhil wa-l-shāḥij (The Epistle of the Horse and the Mule), a winding prose work populated by animal characters who talk about poetry, grammar, riddles, and Syrian society on the eve of the crusades. Traditionally forgotten as a source for al-Maʿarrī's pacifism, and his vegan worldview, the Ṣāhil lets readers see his thinking on animals more than most other works. After a brief survey of animals in Islam, which shows a mainstream desire for balance between human and non-human needs, as well as exceptional cases that strongly uphold animals as subjects per se and which stand as key inter-texts for al-Maʿarrī, this paper considers how the Ṣāhil champions non-human creatures through images of animal cruelty deployed to shock readers into compassion, and through poetry and popular sayings (amthāl) recast in a zoocentric mold. It, therefore, advocates with more fervor than anthropocentric Islamic writings on animals, such as Kalīlah wa-Dimnah or the letters of the Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ. However, this happens in a way that makes it hard to pin down the sources of al-Maʿarrī's thought. Furthermore, al-Maʿarrī seems to contradict himself when, for example, he employs literal meaning when it comes to animal justice, even as he avoids literalism in other contexts. This calls his concern for animals into question in one sense, but in another, it affirms such concern insofar as his self-contradictions show an active mind working through animal ethics in real time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By examining the Sutta Nipāta, considered one of the collections containing the oldest texts of the Pāli canon, this study aims to reconstruct social, historical, and anthropological aspects of archaic Buddhist doctrine at the time of its definition in dialectic with the forces of orthodoxy and constituted power in 6th century BCE India. This study also provides important insights into the development and definition of contemplative practices devoted to the search for the 'absolute' (paramattha and brahmavihāra), which has often received little attention in meditation studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Literacy pedagogy that integrates oracy, poetry and embodiment can foster children's language development in multiple ways: (1) oracy is foundational to children's emergent literacy as writing extends from oral language, (2) poetry uses rhythm and rhyme to support letter-recognition and the learning of phonemes and morphemes, (3) embodiment and roleplay provide semiotic support and opportunities for expressive and receptive communication. This article shares findings from a phenomenological case study investigating how literacy pedagogy that integrated oracy, poetry and embodiment impacted three additional language students aged 6. A series of weekly literacy classes in a school in Sydney's multicultural western region were observed and recorded on video. This instrument was able to capture 'micro-moments' of learning between peers, depicting how physicalisation and the use of rhythm and rhyme effectively engaged students whose first language was not used in the classroom. Using a hermeneutic phenomenological approach to data analysis, case study findings revealed that embodied explorations of poetry immersed participants socially and imaginatively whilst pushing them beyond their additional language comfort zone. The pedagogy was also shown to increase comprehension and support the acquisition of new vocabulary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the visual poetics of the prominent contemporary Russian poet and poetry translator Andrei Sen-Senkov whose work is examined through the Deleuzian lens as a prime example of rhizomatic poetry. Senkov's poetics is that of the commonplace: working with cultural cliches, and primarily visual material, it embeds very private concerns within a global matrix, with astounding and often theoretically challenging results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the characteristic features of the Russian Avant-garde is the close connection between painting and poetry. Futurist poets (Vladimir Maiakovskii, Aleksei Kruchenykh) were educated as artists, their books were illustrated by the famous painters of their time (Mikhail Larionov, Nataliia Goncharova). Some of the Futurists designed their own books and did all kinds of typographical experiments. One of the most productive writers, designers, editors and publishers of such books was Aleksei Kruchenykh (1886–1968), who only recently has been given honour where it is due. One of his admirers is the Neo-avant-garde poet-artist Sergei Sigei (1947–2014), who was the first to publish some of Kruchenykh's hitherto unpublished works and in many respects repeated, changed, and further developed his forerunner's experiments with typographical signs and book production. Some of Sigei's unique handmade books are dedicated to Kruchenykh. Sigei, the leader of the group of the 'transfurists' (Ry Nikonova, Boris Konstriktor, A. Nik, Vladimir Erl') may be considered the main representative of the Russian Neo-avant-garde. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

New Negro magazines such as The Messenger, Opportunity, and The Crisis regularly featured photographs and short descriptions of Black women designed to highlight their role as both moral centers and aspirational figures. These images tended to imply that the ideal New Negro woman would challenge racist stereotypes of Black women not only through her behavior but also through her looks. For instance, a feature in the January 1924 issue of The Messenger called "Exalting Negro Womanhood" seeks to counter the overrepresentation of "[t]he buffoon, the clown, the criminal Negro" in white media with portraits of Black "achievement, culture, refinement, beauty, genius, and talent". But of the twenty women featured in the centerfold of photographs, all are light skinned. Importantly, however, Black women poets of the era, including Gwendolyn B. Bennett, Gladys May Casely-Hayford, Anita Scott Coleman, Jessie Fauset, Angelina Weld Grimké, Helene Johnson, Anne Spencer, and Octavia B. Wynbush, provide a counter to this coding of light skin as desirable through poems that emphasize the beauty of dark-skinned bodies. This essay places their poetry alongside the visuals of the New Negro movement and the larger white supremacist culture of the 1920s. In poems such as Bennett's "To a Dark Girl", Grimké's "The Black Hand", Johnson's "Poem", and Spencer's "Lady, Lady", an emphasis on beautiful and powerful Blackness provides a steady counterpoint to the prevailing color standards surrounding Black female beauty and respectability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What if encounters between modernist poetry and architecture exceed inspiration, imagery, and allusions? These two modes of making have crossed boundaries for over a century, from Walt Whitman's ecstatic stanzas on Manhattan skyscrapers to architect John Hejduk's poetry of memory and place. Buildings become materials for poetry, and poems become material for building. When a literary critic and an architect build on overlaps they have discovered in syllabi for American Poetry and Architecture Studio courses, their teaching collaboration becomes a sustainable maker-space for student work—and for the Humanities more generally. We found that linking a literature survey to an architectural design studio brings materiality and resourcefulness to working with poems and that interacting with the Humanities demonstrates praxis (theory + practice) from the perspective of architectural pedagogy. Our classes also engaged each other through The Repurpose Project, a community space that promotes reuse and diverts waste from the local landfill. The profusion of readily available materials at Repurpose afforded students with a rich sampling of architectural textures and languages, opening new possibilities for thinking and making. In an academic climate that groups literary studies and architecture as "not-STEM," we designed sustainable and resilient pedagogies that go beyond problem solving. Finding the same quality of renewable resourcefulness in Wallace Stevens's "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," we offer 13 tactics for teaching poetry as architecture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Affective aspects are key mediators in the learning process. Whereas some of them can be associated with a certain discipline, others are situational and connected with specific activities that trigger positive emotions. This study analyzes these affective aspects based on two ways of approaching mathematical problems: problem posing and problem solving. In both cases, the starting point will be situations presented in multimodal representation, but with three different mediating elements: a real situation close to the students' reality (text with data and image), a real situation far from the students' reality (text with data and image), and a visual poem (hybrid text with implicit mathematical content that generates critical reading and provokes an aesthetic emotion). The aim is to explore the extent to which the mediating elements have affective and performance implications. To this end, an investigation was designed with future primary school teachers. As will be shown, the results, both in terms of performance and affective factors, are different for problem posing and problem solving. Problem posing based on a visual poem is a stimulating challenge for future teachers. However, in problem solving, as this study shows, the problem posed in a remote real situation is more successful in both performance and affective aspects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Artificial intelligence research in natural language processing in the context of poetry struggles with the recognition of holistic content such as poetic symbolism, metaphor, and other fine-grained attributes. Given these challenges, multi-modal image–poetry reasoning and retrieval remain largely unexplored. Our recent accessibility study indicates that poetry is an effective medium to convey visual artwork attributes for improved artwork appreciation of people with visual impairments. We, therefore, introduce a deep learning approach for the automatic retrieval of poetry suitable to the input images. The recent state-of-the-art CLIP provides a way for multi-modal visual and text features matched using cosine similarity. However, it lacks shared cross-modality attention features to model fine-grained relationships. The proposed approach in this work takes advantage of strong pre-training of the CLIP model and overcomes its limitations by introducing shared attention parameters to better model the fine-grained relationship between both modalities. We test and compare our proposed approach using the expertly annotated MiltiM-Poem dataset, which is considered the largest public image–poetry pair dataset for English poetry. The proposed approach aims to solve the problems of image-based attribute recognition and automatic retrieval for fine-grained poetic verses. The test results reflect that the shared attention parameters alleviate fine-grained attribute recognition, and the proposed approach is a significant step towards automatic multi-modal retrieval for improved artwork appreciation of people with visual impairments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: POEMS syndrome (POEMS) is a rare plasma cell clonal paraneoplastic syndrome consisting of polyneuropathy, organomegaly, endocrinopathy, monoclonal protein, and skin changes presenting with idiopathic multicentric Castleman disease (iMCD) histology, the treatment of which has not yet been well established. iMCD is also a distinctive rare non-clonal lymphoproliferative disorder, of which dramatic response to Siltuximab, a monoclonal anti-IL-6 antibody, has been reported recently. Methods: the differential diagnosis between POEMS and iMCD can be very challenging because of the identical histology, overlapping similar symptoms such as polyneuropathy, and vital signs insidiously presented to diagnose POEMS. Results: here, we report the case of a 53-year-old man with iMCD treated for 8 years developing sequential polyneuropathy, monoclonal gammopathy, and bone lytic lesions, all of which were confirmed after his iMCD achieved complete remission resulting from siltuximab administration and finally confirmed as POEMS. Conclusions: we describe the clinical ambiguity of disease presenting that we can face in the real world between iMCD and POEMS and emphasise careful, enduring observation lasting several years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The jindai moji (神代文字—"characters of the Age of the Gods") are pseudocharacters (疑字: "giji") created in the early modern period, which purport to be an ancient Japanese writing script. One of the most famous examples of literature written in the jindai moji is the epic poem Hotsuma Tsutae, which is regarded as an account of the development of medieval mythology in the early modern age. It includes tales of evil lords known as the hatare (rendered as 魔王 in Kanbun), who bring chaos to the land and are vanquished by a divine army led by gods. Ultranationalists in early modern Japan enthusiastically embraced these jindai moji writings. This article examines the significance of the divine battles in the early modern jindai moji literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay discusses Gerard Manley Hopkin's notions of inscape and instress, examining their early expressions during Hopkins's time as a student at and recent alumnus of Balliol College, Oxford, their subsequent development amid Hopkins's career as a Jesuit novice and priest, and their manifestation in four sonnets composed in 1877. Attention is paid throughout to the likely influence of Hopkins's Balliol tutor, Walter Pater, as well as the influence of Ignatius of Loyola's Spiritual Exercises upon Hopkins's presentation of inscape and instress in his poems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reads Peter Larkin's poem "praying // firs \\ attenuate" (2014) as a way to think the divine in relation to the ecological as a mutual poetic giving. It suggests that the poem entangles the reader in a series of relational imaginings that complicates the modern commodification of the nonhuman and questions a secular fatigue with the divine. Through a Catholic metaphysics in which all things-human, nonhuman, holy-are entangled, Larkin's religious ecology maps the way to horizons promising that which cannot yet be imagined. In an entangled, layered, rhythmic, and echoing poetic form, Larkin reveals the intimate relationship between plenitude and the attenuated, gift and scarcity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The focus is on Atwood's most recent poetry collections; Morning in the Burned House (1995) and The Door (2007), in addition to the prose poems volume The Tent (2006). They have in common, albeit with a different emphasis, a preoccupation with mortality and with the writing of poetry itself. They also share a special concern for space. This reading considers space and landscape to function as metonyms. Space here is far from being passive; instead it is constantly in the process of being constructed. The disorientation that the poetic personae experience in these texts follows a labyrinthine pattern where heterogeneity and multiplicity in the sense of contemporaneous plurality prevail. In this perspective, the identity of a place becomes open and provisional, including that of a place called home. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We are moving towards the information society, and we need to overcome the discouraging perspective, which is caused by the false belief that our thoughts (and thereby also our acting) represent a somehow externally existing world. Indeed, it is already a step forward to proclaim that there exists a somehow common world for all people. But if those internal forms of representation are primarily bound to the subject itself, then, consequently, anybody can argue for his or her view of the world as being the "right" one. Well, what is the exit strategy out of this dilemma? It is information; information as understood in its actual and potential dimension, in its identity of structure and meaning. Such an approach requires a deeper elaborated conceptual approach. The goal of this study is to show that such a concept is glued by the strong relationship between seemingly unrelated disciplines: physics, semantics (semiotics/cognition) and computer science, and even poetry. But the terminus of information is nowadays discussed and elaborated in all those disciplines. Hence, there is no shortcut, no way around. The aim of this study is not even to show that those strong relationships exist. We will see within the same horizon that, based on such a concept, new kinds of computing systems are becoming possible. Nowadays energy consumption is becoming a major issue regarding computing systems. We will work towards an approach, which enables new devices consuming a minimum amount of energy and maximizing the performance at the same time. And within the same horizon it becomes possible to release the saved energy towards a new ethical spirit--towards the information society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing from Emmanuel Levinas's philosophical ethics and Paul Celan's dialogical poetics, this article interrogates the impossible memorial and ethical demands that literary responses to the Holocaust place upon their readers. While Levinas reveals our position as summoned to radical responsibility, Celan shows us how that responsibility plays out in the form of ethical reading. By attending to the imperative commands found in Celan's longest poem, "Engführung", this article demonstrates how Holocaust literature memorializes the Shoah through an invocation of Levinasian ethics and the concept of the immemorial—that which exceeds memory. Following the discussion of Levinas, Celan, and "Engführung", I turn to Primo Levi's "Shema", a paradigmatic text that likewise directly challenges us, calling us into question as readers during the moment of reading and demanding an attentiveness to the text that proves beyond our ability to deliver. Throughout, I aim to show how dialogical memory enables us to better comprehend the ethical burden we encounter in the literary texts of the Holocaust. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to examine how the Kashmiri-American poet Agha Shahid Ali explores and rethinks ideas of "home" and travel in his poetry. Ali's poetry is a layered affective terrain in which his complex, entangled emotions surrounding home, exile, nostalgia, displacement, and travel play out. I argue that Ali's verse, through multiple journeys ranging over locations, languages, cultures, and literary terrain, interrogates and collapses the boundaries between the "home" and the world. I read his poetry as voicing the "disturbed" and displaced home of Kashmir, while simultaneously distilling a "re-homing" desire. Such an impulse reconfigures and reimagines the home through the inhabiting and repeated "homing" of multiple, "foreign" locations. Poetic travel across geographic and literary terrain, in Ali's oeuvre, thus speaks to the fraught and complex nature of the "home" in postcolonial and diasporic contexts, while remapping the home through the "re-homing" of the "foreign". Arguing that "travel" is a means of negotiating and rethinking the "home" in Ali's poetry, the article examines the intermeshed and dialogic relationship between home and travel that imbues his verse. Focusing particularly on poetic experimentation as a mode of travel, it aims to show how such literary travel makes new homes, while remembering and articulating Ali's lost homes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this autoethnographic essay, the author argues for the use of poetic inquiry as a feminist methodology by showing her use of poetry as research method during the past 13 years. Through examples of her poetic inquiry work, the author details how poetry as research offers Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies scholars a means of doing, showing, and teaching embodiment and reflexivity, a way to refuse the mind-body dialectic, a form of feminist ethnography, and a catalyst for social agitation and change. The author uses examples of her ethnographic poetry that critique middle-class White motherhood, address the problems of White feminism, and reflects the nuances of identity negotiation in research and personal life to show the breadth of topics and approaches of poetic inquiry as feminist research practice and feminist pedagogy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]