...This 1991 poem by Dana Gioia is about a family with earth on their hands, who calls on an ancient Sicilian ritual of planting a sequoia for a firstborn with a lock of his hair. Dana Gioia poem family Sicilian ritual planting sequoia hair firstborn All afternoon my brothers and I have worked...

...In this chapter the author focuses on one particular “encounter poem,” perhaps the earliest one that Wordsworth wrote that would fit the criteria of the “encounter poem,” however defined. Wordsworth wrote “The Discharged Soldier” between January and March of 1798 at a crucial moment in his career...

...The prose poems of Le Spleen de Paris substitute for the allegorical mode of awareness of the “Tableaux Parisiens” an ironic mode; that of an apparently absent divinity and of anonymous urban encounters, one that makes the familiar strange when it becomes the object of attention...

...This chapter discusses the poem “Ash Wednesday” and fold. Like touch, the fold gives us a sense of knowing that is elusive and continuing. Intriguing gender issues emerge in the poem to embody immanence and the apparently masculine narrator transcendence, but the theory from both Deleuze...

...This chapter is primarily concerned with the prologue of the poem, where Odysseus is a submerged presence, ignored by most critics. It discusses not only the transformation of the epic into the novel, which is the essence of Dante's fictional account of Ulysses, but what Lukács calls...

...“Kiss me, make me drunk with your kisses! Your sweet loving / is better than wine”. The great love poem that begins with these words does not follow the conventional romantic plot: boy meets girl, boy and girl get acquainted, boy proposes marriage. That the two are already intimate is clear from...

...Jean-Luc Nancy at his most lyrical: “Nude Enumerated” is a prose-poem, an eloquent evocation of the naked body, figure drawing through words. An exploration of what it means to be truly naked. the body the nude prose poem 139 Nude: conquered, triumphant; undone, reassembled; lost, found...

... Keston Sutherland's Odes to TL61P (2013) and US poet Anne Boyer's "The Animal Model of Inescapable Shock" (2015). Finally, I turn to the literal displacement of forced migration, as well as its feminization and racialization, by reading the Iraqi poet Manal Al-Sheikh's prose poems...

... activity and even more so if the materials enhancing such fascination present themselves as revolutionary in nature. The chapter also analyzes Edgar Allan Poe's works that suggest writing a poem is conceived as an absolute commodity that defines beforehand the points of sensibility upon which the poem must...

...This chapter examines an essay that interprets a poem without a title that begins “As when upon a day of rest …”. Written in 1800, the poem is composed of seven strophes, and in it Hölderlin arranges the meaning of the poet's task. It provides a reason for calling Hölderlin “the poet of the poet...

...Hart Crane acknowledged the problem of creating a representative tale of the American tribe. Unlike other writers, however, Crane harnessed the long poem’s generic incapacity to universalize experience as his poem’s central structural and thematic principle. This failure of linguistic union...

...This 1991 poem by Brian McCormick is about “the night Neil Armstrong impressed the thin dust on the moon, I made my meld in diamonds, playing pinochle, two decks cut and sussed with my foster family, Italian Americans, all now dead...” Brian McCormick poem Neil Armstrong moon foster family...

...For the past two centuries discussions of the meter and rhythm of a line of poetry have often been at cross-purposes because of different assumptions about whether the poem is a temporal object. References to the idiosyncrasies of a “performance” have confused the question by contrasting a specific...

... Szittya Penn R palimpsest babewyns in medieval manuscripts manuscripts Omne bonum poet as maker poetics mappae mundi writing vellum sheets Cubism Poetry Contemporary poetry Poetics Omne bonum Manuscript Scribe Palimpsest Prose poem Dinaw Mengestu Dante medieval The genre...

...Most of the striking accounts of particular poems and of poetry itself during the past century were broadly formalist in character, whether they went by the labels of semiotics, the New Criticism, structuralism, or poststructuralism. Seen from the twenty-first century, these are all manifestations...

...In chapter 14, J. Kameron Carter offers an interpretation of the poem Zong! by M. NourbeSe Philip. Zong is the name of a British slave ship on which around 150 African slaves were murdered in 1781. Philip produces her poem Zong! with words from...

...This chapter analyzes a villancico (religious poem) by Saint Teresa of Avila. It considers the poem's complex play of competing and contradictory affirmations, setting as a point of departure the way in which the speaker in the work enunciates out of a death that is also a life...

...This chapter argues that, to bring the Anthropocene into a specifically poetic language, poets have recalled and revised the tradition of the loco-descriptive poem and the prospect poem. J.H. Prynne, Kofi Awoonor, Natasha Trethewey, and Juliana Spahr use the hill as an imaginative location...

..., Venus switches from being a manhandler to being a pathetic mourner over the body of dead Adonis. This kind of switch becomes a major problem because it is hard to rationalize the transition specially when convincing. Although passion and grief are twinned conditions of wanting, the shift in this poem...

...Skaldic picture poems reveal contemporary practices of visual interpretation: a ‘Viking eye.’ A comparison with antique ekphrastic practice demonstrates the importance in these poems of vividness, emotional impact, and the ambivalence of the visual medium. Puzzle pictures, typical of decorative art...