An audience matters

The New Wallace Stevens Studies, 2021

Follow a prominent strand of Wallace Stevens studies over a half-century in the making, and you might expect a chapter on "Community and Audience" in his poetry to amount to something between a brief interlude and a blank page: there is neither a sense of community nor any actual human audience to speak of. Or else a chapter titled "Community and Audience" might focus, paradoxically, on Stevens's idiosyncrasy and alienation, his self-address and private languages. In the eyes of this critical community (better populated, apparently, than any community in Stevens's own poetry), Stevens wrote for an audience of one, Americanizing the royal "we," speaking for others only as a matter of elaborate stagecraftthe impersonation and costumery of his one-man show. In a 1951 review, Randall Jarrell diagnosed in Stevens's The Auroras of Autumn "the weakness. .. of thinking of particulars as primarily illustrations of general truths, or else as aesthetic, abstracted objects, simply there to be contemplated; he often treats things or lives so that they seem no more than generalizations of an unprecedentedly low order." In Jarrell's depiction of Stevens's mathematical mind, the lives of "us poor, dishonest people" were nothing but abstracted plot-points, "no more than data to be manipulated": "It is the lack of immediate contact with lives that hurts his poetry more than anything else" (140-41). Later twentieth-century critics found even less than "immediate contact with lives." Hugh Kenner found Stevens's world "empty of people," his poems "not populated, except by cartoon-like wisps" (75, 83); Mark Halliday, titling a study Stevens and the Interpersonal (1991), beheld nothing there: "Stevens' poetry largely tries to ignore or deny all aspects of life that center on or are inseparable from interpersonal relations" (3). Stevens's legacy as modern poetry's strictest solitaryin art, in life, in lasting sensibilitypersists pervasively among postwar and contemporary poets, whether avowing their indebtedness (Louise Glück, in her 1996 collection Meadowlands: "If you're so desperate / for precedent, try / Stevens. Stevens / never traveled; that doesn't mean / he

This conference poses the question “Has Fiction Lost its Faith?” I suggest that this question is roughly the same as that asked in the title of Dana Gioia’s 1991 essay, “Can Poetry Matter?” If literature and literary study make any substantive contribution to the common good, it must be because both poetry and criticism are bound up with the active life in much the way teaching is, as a traditionary and culture-making work. The cultural moment that leads us to ask such questions as “Has Fiction Lost its Faith?” and “Can Poetry Matter?” is also the moment for which poems such as Holderlin’s “Bread and Wine” were written. As those who concern ourselves with poetry “in lean years”—also translated “the destitute time”—we will certainly want to take counsel in the matter. Beginning with the unlikely pairing of Martin Heidegger and Francis Schaeffer, and picking up some guidelines from St. Thomas Aquinas, I hope to identify some of the material conditions for a poetry that keeps faith and matters. [...] In a culture experiencing “the destitute time,” poetry can matter when poets called into close contact with the definite and plurivocal nature of the sacraments wrestle with the implications of that understanding for every part of life. Our culture’s rapid political and epistemic pendulum swings merely perpetuate the “divided field” of human reason that Schaeffer correctly diagnoses, but cannot cure with univocal propositions. It ought to be possible, however, to engage in a poetics of adjustment to the status of creature that richly explores analogical language and the allegorical understanding of history and lived experience; this should be most possible for those richly engaged in the sacramental life of the Church.

Phenomenological Inquiry in Education Theories, Practices, Provocations and Directions Edited By Edwin Creely, Jane Southcott, Kelly Carabott, Damien Lyons, 2021

This chapter explores and encounters the experiences of a group of older Australians who are part of a poetry class in the University of the Third Age (U3A), a well-known Australian and international program offering courses aimed at giving older and retired people continuing educational and recreational experiences. The chapter focuses on the voices of members of the poetry class and especially on their experiences of being together in their discussion about big ideas and poetry. Throughout our text we interweave theory, narratives, and participant and researcher voices. The chapter considers the affective engagement that was engendered in the context of the poetry group, using experiences drawn from a focus group and a series of interviews with class participants. We found that the poetry writing was built on platforms of honesty, trust and respect, so that the class allowed writers of all backgrounds and experience to participate and find success. Please note that this is a draft, pre-print version. Please go to the address below for the final book: https://www.routledge.com/Phenomenological-Inquiry-in-Education-Theories-Practices-Provocations/Creely-Southcott-Carabott-Lyons/p/book/9780367250317

2020

The stigmatization of aging by reducing it to losses is due both to the denaturalization of the phenomenon and to the influence of cultural ideas on aging that disregard their subjective aspects. The aim of this paper is to present research participating in a poetry workshop, from a group of older adult women (aged over sixty years) reading and writing poetry. The research monitored whether reading and writing poetry helped in the production of new meanings about aging, as well as the reflection that the older adults had about the aging development phase and its aesthetic, social and cultural ramifications. After reading the poems produced and the descriptive notes of the meetings, the following categories of analysis emerged: the meetings as an area of appropriation, conviviality and reflection for the participants; society and the possibility of an active position in aging; the appropriation of the body in aging: experiences and criticism of the aesthetic model; and memory: recoll...

Poetry And Imagined Worlds

Journal of Women & Aging, 2012

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae, and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand, or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.

Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 2002

The public life is one entered more by the patience of the poetic ear than by the sharpness of the pen or the truth of the facts.

2015