Maria Damon
Auteur de Poetry and Cultural Studies: A Reader
A propos de l'auteur
Maria Damon is a professor in the Department of English at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities and a faculty affiliate of Minnesota's Department of American Studies; Department of Gender, Women, and Sexuality; Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature; Department of Theatre Arts afficher plus and Dance; and Center for Jewish Studies. She is the author of The Dark End of the Street: Margins in American Vanguard Poetry and coeditor (with Ira Livingston) of Poetry and Cultural Studies: A Reader. She has collaborated with mIKEAL aND on several poetry projects and written, with Betsy Franco, The Secret Life of Words: Poetry Exercises and Activities, Grades 3-6. afficher moins
Œuvres de Maria Damon
E.n.t.r.a.n.c.e.d. 2 exemplaires
Unarmed #2: Adventurous Poetry Journal 1 exemplaire
Étiqueté
Partage des connaissances
Membres
Critiques
Statistiques
- Œuvres
- 7
- Membres
- 25
- Popularité
- #508,561
- Évaluation
- 4.0
- Critiques
- 1
- ISBN
- 8
For example, in high school and college a certain amount of poetry is covered in English, but admitting you like poetry at that age is akin to outing your inner nerd. Only a few could get away with it and still be cool (Keith, AG, Class of ’84: you did it…you were still the coolest!). Then, as we age, reading or writing poetry is often a way that some identify a snob or someone with too much time on their hands. If you say that you are writing a book, you can maintain some respect and a bit of eccentricity. Say that you are writing a poem and you get looked at askance, at least in my corner of the world.
Then there’s the problem of identifying “quality” poetry: there’s an attitude about high-brow poems that if you have to ask what it means, you are surely too dense to get it anyway (and I freely admit I am too dense to get some of the more abstract types). Some of the more famous poets get written off as if, by becoming commercially successful, they’re less important. Then there’s a few of the edgier poets whose content is so filled with obscenities and graphic depictions that you simply end up confused at their purpose (one title, which shall remain nameless, was sent to me to review, and every single poem had a penis somewhere in the verse, I kid you not!). The variety of work is incredible as are the techniques, and I freely admit to enjoying most of it. Billy Collins, Kay Ryan, Scott Wannberg, Alex Boyd, Richard Wilbur, and Susan Rich are some of my favorites. Manolis is new to me and I’m enjoying his work is well.
That’s where this title, Poetry and Cultural Studies: A Reader comes into play. The premise is simple: culture creates a poetic voice, and varying cultures generate different styles, subjects, and emotional responses. The most obvious reference is to rap music lyrics, and how the culture of black society in the US created this form of expression. However, editors Maria Damon and Ira Livingston did a far more thorough study. For example, Nicaragua is discussed in Bruce Campbell’s essay “Assembly Poetics in the Global Economy”, and he relays how the culture there actually promotes poetic expression: “The Sandinista revolution (1979-90) distinguished Nicaragua as the first nation for which poetry and sweeping social, economic, and political change were closely identified. There were poetry workshops designed to create readers and writes of poetry…Famously, ‘a nation of poets’ was declared, pronounced, spoken, read into being in the 1980s.” He goes on to show how even after the Sandinistas no longer were in charge (during their leadership literacy rates increased dramatically), poetry is commonly found in newspapers and is a constant feature of Nicaraguan life. He goes on to explain the signs and convergence of globalization on regional poetry.
Are there complications to the advance of poetry in a literate society? Trinh T. Minh-ha points out in the essay, “Poetry and Anthropology”, that “poetic language could therefore be a process that destabilizes institutionalized ways of writing, [and] …unsettles the identity of meaning and speaking subject.” And speaking to the unique styles of poetry, “it engages meaning in all its subtleties and prevents it from ending with what is written and said.” In other words, the study of literature and poetry do not necessarily mesh because one invites interpretation and the other could have multiple meanings, and understanding poetry is often dependent on cultural motifs, clues, and authorship.
In Audre Lorde’s essay “Poetry is Not a Luxury” she speaks to how allowing our creative voice to speak and refers to poetry “as illumination”: “It is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are-until the poem-nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt.” She encourages self-expression because “each one of us holds an incredible reserve of creativity and power, of unexamined and unrecorded emotion and feeling.” Her essay examines all the possibilities of such freedom and birth of thought, both for a poet and for a reader of poetry. She concludes with “there are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt…”
This collection was published by the University of Illinois Press and could be considered the standard for understanding the differences in styles, regions, and importance of a variety of poetry styles.… (plus d'informations)