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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
“An Aquatic Reverie” | Mallarmé’S Writing On Water And The Naming Of Waves, Clark Lunberry
“An Aquatic Reverie” | Mallarmé’S Writing On Water And The Naming Of Waves, Clark Lunberry
English Faculty Research and Scholarship
At his home outside Paris, in Valvin, Stéphane Mallarmé spent much time on his small boat dreamily sailing upon the Seine, seeing this body of flowing water as a site for inspiration and inscription. Indeed, Mallarmé once confided to a friend, “I no longer write a poem without an aquatic reverie running through it,” and that, for him, poetry was like an “oar stroke,” and the sail, a “white page.” When Mallarmé was invited to lecture at Oxford University in 1894, he did not speak specifically of time spent on the water, his life on the Seine, but his own …
Writing On Basho's Pond, Clark Lunberry
Writing On Basho's Pond, Clark Lunberry
English Faculty Research and Scholarship
Matsuo Bashō (1644–94) is Japan’s most well-known haiku poet; and Bashō’s poem about the old pond, the jumping frog, and the sound of water is Bashō’s best-known haiku. Indeed, this haiku, like Bashō himself, is known well beyond Japan, long ago attaining through its many translations a degree of international recognition. However, in Japan, awareness of Bashō, and of his frog haiku, goes well beyond simple recognition, having long ago absorbed itself into a broader and more complex form of remembrance and, with that absorption, a nearly reflexive response by many of those hearing it. Often, the mere mention of …
Bodies Of Water: Somebody | Nobody (For E.D.), Clark Lunberry
Bodies Of Water: Somebody | Nobody (For E.D.), Clark Lunberry
English Faculty Research and Scholarship
On a pond adjacent to the University of North Florida’s Thomas G. Carpenter Library, parts of Emily Dickinson’s well-known poem about being a “Nobody” were recently written on the water. During the fall of 2014, the familiar words of that poem’s opening line – “I’m Nobody! Who are you?” – appeared to float upon the library’s pond, reflecting vividly in the light of day (yet disappearing entirely in the dark of night). While inside the library’s large open stairway, on the tall windows that face directly out onto that pond, the first line of the poem’s second stanza – “How …
Reinventing Language, Vowel By Colorful Vowel, Clark Lunberry
Reinventing Language, Vowel By Colorful Vowel, Clark Lunberry
English Faculty Research and Scholarship
A Fable of a Fable, or “The Story of One of My Follies”: After he’d invented “the color of vowels,” regulated the “form and movement of each consonant,” the young poet then, applying his “instinctive rhythms” to the task, proudly proclaimed that he had alchemically created “a poetic language accessible, some day, to all the senses.” Notably, with his project in place, this poet, Arthur Rimbaud, tells us that he was then quick to “reserve translation rights.” This legal move on the poet’s part was perhaps thought initially necessary because, as he notes in 1873, the described synesthetic impact of …
That’S The Beauty Of It, Or, Why John Ashbery Is Not A Painter, Clark Lunberry
That’S The Beauty Of It, Or, Why John Ashbery Is Not A Painter, Clark Lunberry
English Faculty Research and Scholarship
The poet John Ashbery lived in Paris from roughly 1955 to 1965. It was during this period that Ashbery began writing art reviews, often examining the work of various Americans also living in Paris at this time. Among the many painters Ashbery was to review and publish about, one was the Chicago-born, Paris-based abstract expressionist Joan Mitchell and an exhibition of hers at a Paris gallery in 1964. In this essay I examine the early, more ““abstract”” poetry that Ashbery was developing during this period, thinking about it alongside the paintings of Mitchell (and, in particular, his writings about them). …