Word: poetes
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Gioia points to the widespread incorporation of creative writing into the academy as a key source of public indifference. Where poets once scraped by in bohemia, brooding over coffee in French cafes, today many teach writing at the secondary or post-secondary school level. Where celebrated poets like Wallace Stevens, T.S. Eliot and William Carlos Williams earned livings as corporate insurance lawyer, banker and physician, respectively, today "the poet...has reluctantly become an educational specialist...
...references to historical events places Undersong not only within the context of Lorde's full life but within the greater context of America over the last thirty years. The book's final poem, entitled "Need: A Chorale for Black Woman Voices" takes the form of a dialogue between the poet and two Black women beaten to death in two American cities in the late seventies. The poet's closing words are "How much of this truth can I bear/ to see/ and still live/ unblinded?/ How much of this pain...
...word "blood" appears in many poems in all four of the sections into which Undersong is divided and creates a link between the violence she depicts and her emphasis on birth and children. Children continually appear, especially in the later poems, as pupils whom the poet-teacher Lorde instructs. They reinforce the image of the woman-mother as a central and strong figure. In one poem "Dear Toni Instead of a Letter of Congratulation Upon Your Book and Your Daughter Whom You Say You Are Raising to be a Correct Little Sister," Lorde, as mother-teacher-writer, addresses another mother...
...Serbs not only vehemently deny encouraging mass rape but also deny that such rapes have even occurred. Croats and Muslims have also denied such practices. The Balkans reverberate to this counterpoint of denial, a victim symphony of outraged innocence. Radovan Karadzic, who is a poet and a psychiatrist as well as the ruthless commander-in-chief of the Bosnian Serbs, tries a reverse approach. He says soldiers on all sides are committing rape. He sounds the note of bogus fatalism that is also a kind of blessing of rape: "It is tragic. But these dreadful things happen in all wars...
After the brief contextualization, Bloom would read the poems in translation. Not trying to play the role of a Russian poet, she interpreted the poems in a uniquely English manner. Her crisp, not exceptionally emotional delivery avoided the heavy tragedy of a Russian interpretation; her tone seemed more melancholic than anything else. She even added humor and irony to her reading of Tsvetaeva's "An Attempt at Jealousy." By offering an Anglicized version of the poems, she gave an American audience the opportunity to relate to the poetry on its own cultural terms, not simply as outsiders to the literary...