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Poetry and Poetics IV: The Intimate Public Sphere

Session 8 - Sunday 2:45-4:15pm
Henry Hall 207
Presiding Officer: 
Steven Gould Axelrod
Session Chair (if other than PO): 
Jeffrey Gray
  1. The Maternal Body in Allen Ginsberg's Poetics: "O mother/with . . . a long black beard around the vagina". Hannah Baker, University of York, England

    The buried subject of “Howl” is Ginsberg’s mentally ill mother, Naomi Ginsberg, and the decision to authorize her lobotomy. In “Kaddish,” Ginsberg tells his mother’s story, explores the maternal body, and locates his poetic origins within his mother’s paranoid mind.

  2. Theodore Roethke in the Greenhouse: "This Heaven and Hell at Once". Marc Malandra, Biola University

    Roethke’s ability to transform landscape into lyric arises from a quasi-romantic conviction that any attempt at a poetic reconstruction of the self involves a root-seeking appreciation of the environs of one’s youth.

  3. Baudelaire’s Place in Korean Feminist Poetics. Jung Choi, Harvard University

    This paper explores the influence of French symbolist poetry on modern feminist Korean poetry in the early twentieth century by analyzing the work of Kim Myŏng-Sun and her translation of poems by Charles Baudelaire.

  4. Trauma, Analogy, and the Poems of Vietnam. Steven Gehrke, University of Nevada, Reno

    Douglas Hofstadter argues that analogy is so central to thought that when analogies fail, the mind itself breaks down. In Vietnam War poetry, metaphor-making is an involuntary, inadequate response to trauma, but often the metaphoric failure helps the poems succeed.

Session Type: 
Standing Session
Session Status: 
Closed