Activist Poetics

Activist Poetics

Author: John Kinsella

Publisher: Liverpool University Press

Published: 2010-01-01

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 1846314690

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John Kinsella is known internationally as the acclaimed author of more than thirty books of poetry and prose, but in tandem with—and often through—those creative works, Kinsella is also a prominent political activist. In this collection of essays, he explores anarchism, veganism, pacifism, and ecological poetics and makes a compelling argument for poetry as a vital form of resistance to a variety of social and ethical ills. Building on his own earlier notion of "linguistic disobedience," he analyzes his poetry and prose in the context of resistance. For Kinsella, all poetry is a call to action, and Activist Poetics reads like a lively manifesto for it to escape the aesthetic vacuum and enter the real world.


Social Poetics

Social Poetics

Author: Mark Nowak

Publisher: Coffee House Press

Published: 2020-03-10

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 1566895758

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Social Poetics documents the imaginative militancy and emergent solidarities of a new, insurgent working class poetry community rising up across the globe. Part autobiography, part literary criticism, part Marxist theory, Social Poetics presents a people’s history of the poetry workshop from the founding director of the Worker Writers School. Nowak illustrates not just what poetry means, but what it does to and for people outside traditional literary spaces, from taxi drivers to street vendors, and other workers of the world.


Identity Poetics

Identity Poetics

Author: Linda Garber

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13: 9780231110327

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What do we now know about the origins of plants on land, from an evolutionary and an environmental perspective? The essays in this collection present a synthesis of our present state of knowledge, integrating current information in paleobotany with physical, chemical, and geological data.


Diasporic Poetics

Diasporic Poetics

Author: Timothy Yu

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2021-07-08

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 0192637819

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This book advances a new concept of the "Asian diaspora" that creates links between Asian American, Asian Canadian, and Asian Australian identities. Drawing from comparable studies of the black diaspora, it traces the histories of colonialism, immigration, and exclusion shared by these three populations. The work of Asian poets in each of these three countries offers a rich terrain for understanding how Asian identities emerge at the intersection of national and transnational flows, with the poets' thematic and formal choices reflecting the varied pressures of social and cultural histories, as well as the influence of Asian writers in other national locations. Diasporic Poetics argues that racialized and nationally bounded "Asian" identities often emerge from transnational political solidarities, from "Third World" struggles against colonialism to the global influence of the American civil rights movement. Indeed, this volume shows that Asian writers disclaim national belonging as often as they claim it, placing Asian diasporic writers at a critical distance from the national spaces within which they write. As the first full-length study to compare Asian American, Asian Canadian, and Asian Australian writers, the book offers the historical and cultural contexts necessary to understand the distinctive development of Asian writing in each country, while also offering close analysis of the work of writers such as Janice Mirikitani, Fred Wah, Ouyang Yu, Myung Mi Kim, and Cathy Park Hong.


A Poetics of Resistance

A Poetics of Resistance

Author: Jeff Conant

Publisher: AK Press

Published: 2010-08-01

Total Pages: 384

ISBN-13: 1849350418

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Part literary criticism, part media analysis, and part marketing handbook, A Poetics of Resistance provides a refreshingly new take on the Zapatistas. While much has been written on the history of the Zapatista insurgency and on the communiqués of Subcomandante Marcos, very little has been said about Zapatismo: the ideologies, organizing methodologies, and communications strategies of the movement. The appeal of the Zapatistas, and their survival, has as much to do with their goals as with the compelling and wildly effective language and aesthetics they’ve used to convey their vision. Weaving together varied elements of poetics and symbolism, Zapatismo has emerged as something entirely new: a resolutely radical public relations campaign for human liberation. The first “postmodern revolution” presented itself to the world through a complex and evolving web of propaganda, using a wide range of media: the colorful communiqués of Marcos; the ski masks, uniforms, toy dolls, and other accoutrements of the insurgent or sympathizer; and murals, songs, and other popular cultural forms. Employing persuasive publicity, myths, and symbols, the Zapatistas both communicated their message and developed a clear aesthetic that could contain many messages at once and self-replicate on a global scale. Jeff Conant offers an engaging and innovative tool for organizers and educators to understand how the Zapatistas' strategy works, and to continue developing and refining their effective messages of participatory, bottom-up revolution. Jeff Conant is a writer and activist in the San Francisco Bay Area and the author of A Community Guide to Environmental Health.


Floating, Brilliant, Gone

Floating, Brilliant, Gone

Author: Franny Choi

Publisher: SCB Distributors

Published: 2014-08-22

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13: 1938912942

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In her electrifying debut, Franny Choi leads readers through the complex landscapes of absence, memory, and identity. Beginning in loss and ending in reflective elation, Floating, Brilliant, Gone explores life as a brief impossibility, “infinite / until it isn’t.” Punctuated with haunting illustrations by Jess X. Chen, Choi’s poems read like lucid dreams that jolt awake at the most unexpected moments.


I Am a Rohingya

I Am a Rohingya

Author: James Byrne

Publisher: ARC Publications

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781911469698

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"The Rohingya poets gathered here for the first time in English hold a mirror to the light for the rest of humanity, flashing their poems of misery and warning from the genocidal zone and refugee camp of Cox's Bazaar. Their songs are more accurate than news reports for word of the plight of the most oppressed. These are poems that begin with the fragrance on the bird's handkerchief and end by walking among the mass graves. They write from a dire present to a possible future, wondering in their peril if the world outside was too quiet to hear them. Let the world not be quiet, let the world listen to these poems." - Carolyn Forché "I Am a Rohingya implores the world to listen to the spirit of a people who have experienced some of the worst human rights abuses on the planet. These poems have no alternative but to speak out, they are from a crisis that must be addressed. There is brilliance in here!" - John Kinsella


Literary Activism

Literary Activism

Author: Amit Chaudhuri

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018-02-15

Total Pages: 328

ISBN-13: 0199091404

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Literary Activism revisits and interrogates, and looks to renew, the force of the literary. It's a movement that emerges from a radically altered landscape for both publishing and academia, where what Amit Chaudhuri calls ‘market activism’ has effected changes – on language, on the measuring of value, on the concept of influence – in ways we struggle to recognise. Encompassing the perspectives of the writer, critic, translator, academic, and publisher, the essays in this volume follow no single line of enquiry. Rather, they offer the beginnings of an analysis of the literary world at a certain moment of globalisation, while also questioning whether a literary world exists and, if it does, where its boundaries lie. The collection moves in many directions – from Arun Kolatkar and his near-heroic refusal of both marketplace and reputation; to Derek Attridge, who argues for a form of affirmative criticism which positions the critic as a ‘lover of the text’; while, from Amsterdam, Dubravka Ugrešić reflects on life in a literary ‘out of nation zone’, adrift in a territory where intellectual protest has been stripped of ideological impetus and subsumed by the voraciousness of the market. Taken together, these essays initiate a series of conversations about who reads what and why, about the practice of writing and criticism at this particular contemporary moment, and about the activities and institutions that shape an understanding of what literature is and what it can do.


Temporariness

Temporariness

Author: John Kinsella

Publisher: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag

Published: 2018-12-03

Total Pages: 528

ISBN-13: 3823301039

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Temporariness is a scandal in our culture of monumentalism and its persistent search for permanence. Temporariness, the time of the ephemeral and the performative, the time of speech, the time of nature and its constant changesthese times have little cultural purchase. In this volume two practitioners and theoreticians of time, space and the word embrace the notion of temporarinessseeing in it a site for a renewal of ways of thinking about ourselves, our language, our society and our environment. This collage of fragmentary genres approaches the notion of mitigated presence to build an atlas of intersections attentive to our own temporariness as the site of aesthetic and ethical responsibility. This book is a scintillating meditation on the temporality of human lives and the contemporary possibilities of humanistic writing. John Kinsella and Russell West-Pavlov explore the conjunctions of memoir, theory, poetry, anecdotes, journal entries and other fragmentary forms in their conversations about the political realities of the world and the imperatives of human survival. They write across hemispheres, they interanimate the specific experience of place and history in Germany, Ireland, Western Australia, the Adriatic coast, Africa, New England. 't?mp(?)r?r?n?s is the chance collaboration of two writers and intellectuals that could never have come into existence before it did and that can never be repeated. Philip Mead, University of Melbourne


Identity Poetics

Identity Poetics

Author: Linda Garber

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2001-10-17

Total Pages: 275

ISBN-13: 0231506724

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"Queer theory," asserts Linda Garber, "alternately buries and vilifies lesbian feminism, missing its valuable insights and ignoring its rich contributions." Rejecting the either/or choice between lesbianism and queer theory, she favors an inclusive approach that defies current factionalism. In an eloquent challenge to the privileging of queer theory in the academy, Garber calls for recognition of the historical—and intellectually significant—role of lesbian poets as theorists of lesbian identity and activism. The connections, Garber shows, are most clearly seen when looking at the pivotal work of working-class lesbians/lesbians of color whose articulations of multiple, simultaneous identity positions and activist politics both belong to lesbian feminism and presage queer theory. Identity Poetics includes a critical overview of recent historical writing about the women's and lesbian-feminist movements of the 1970s; discussions of the works of Judy Grahn, Pat Parker, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, and Gloria Anzaldúa; and, finally, a chapter on the rise and hegemony of queer theory within lesbigay studies.