Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Be: Fall/Winter 2023–2024 Issue, Be: A Journal Of Black Experimental And Interdisciplinary Work

Publications and Research

Our fall/winter issue explores, with a cool and objective eye, memory and history; it may give you some necessary de ja vu, as we think of family, books, and films we want to preserve. This is our interview/review issue, and we’ve spoken to people or reviewed work that seems necessary for building better futures. Our interview with Amos White argues for the preservation of life-giving and life-affirming trees. We’ve also included reviews of heart-opening books — Tara Christina’s “More than a Drop” and Caron Knauer’s “American Slavery on Film” — that reinforce the significance of familial and collective memory. And …

Be: The Summer Issue, Be: A Journal Of Black Experimental And Interdisciplinary Work

Publications and Research

This season’s issue pays tribute to the #BlackLivesMatter summit at LaGuardia Community College (led by Kyle Hollar-Gregory, Esq., Jason Hendrickson, Rachel Romain, Allia Abdullah-Matta, Andre Ford, Sultan Jenkins, Ryan Mann-Hamilton, Wendy Nicholson, Charis Victory, Shaunee Wallace, Donniece Davis, and Jeffery Batts) and writer and activist Alexis Pauline Gumbs, a “Queer Black Troublemaker and Black Feminist Love Evangelist.” We’re thinking about how to support each other, sustain commitment, and create change, while living with joy and complexity.

— The Editors: Ahmad Wright, Tara Christina, and Rochelle Spencer (LaGuardia Community College, English Department)

I, Discomfort Woman: A Fugue In F Minor, Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Ritual, Spectacle, And Theatre In Late Medieval Seville (Chapter 1), Christopher B. Swift

Publications and Research

From the fall of Islamic Išbīliya in 1248 to the conquest of the New World, Seville was a nexus of economic and religious power where interconfessional living among Christians, Jews, and Muslims was negotiated on public stages. From out of seemingly irreconcilable ideologies of faith, hybrid performance culture emerged in spectacles of miraculous transformation, disciplinary processionals, and representations of religious identity. Ritual, Spectacle, and Theatre in Late Medieval Seville reinvigorates the study of medieval Iberian theater by revealing the ways in which public expressions of devotion, penance, and power fostered cultural reciprocity, rehearsed religious difference, and ultimately helped establish Seville …

"The Battle Trumpet Blown!": Whitman's Persian Imitations In Drum-Taps, Roger Sedarat

Publications and Research

While Walt Whitman’s thematic use of the Orient continues to receive critical attention based on his explicit foreign references, aside from observations of specific Persian signifiers in “A Persian Lesson,” his engagement with the poetry of Iran has remained especially speculative and therefore analogical, with studies like J. R. LeMaster and Sabahat Jahan’s Walt Whitman and the Persian Poets showing how his mystical relation to his own religious influences tends to resemble the Sufism of Rumi and Hafez. A new discovery emerging from an examination of his personal copy of William Alger’s The Poetry of the East along with his …

Contamine De Latour, Gimnopedista Desconegut, Antoni Pizà

Publications and Research

Posats a triar quina de les excentricitats d’Erik Satie és la més simpàtica, la més memorable i la que, al cap i a la fi, resumeix les paradoxes de la seva essència com a artista, jo em quedaria amb la llegenda de la seva dieta. «Jo no menjo més que aliments blancs: ous, sucre, cocos...». D’extravagàncies, però, no en falten en la seva biografia, començant per la gran majoria de les seves composicions a on, no hi trobem com a títols ni «sonates» ni «simfonies», sinó «Embrions dissecats» o «Peces en forma de pera».

Flor Del Espinillo: Internacional Vii, Carlos Aguasaco, Diana Araujo

Publications and Research

Piedra del Guadalquivir Serie escrita leyendo el Arte Poética de Borges y siguiendo la numeración maya

Fake News Poetry Workshop As Radical Digital Media Literacy: It’S For The Thing We’Re Not Yet,, Alexandra Juhasz

Publications and Research

One of 17 saddle stitched pamphlets + custom designed box

What does pedagogy mean to your writing practice? How do your poetics intersect with your pedagogy and education commitments? We invited participants to join together to think about the inventive and urgent possibilities of intertwined poetic-pedagogical work. What might emerge differently when we bring them together?

Urgent Possibilities, Writings on Feminist Poetics & Emergent Pedagogies grew out of the Feminist Poetics, Emergent Pedagogies Symposium organized by Andrea Quaid and Margaret Rhee. The publication collects work by symposium participants with documents and elaborations, including poems, poetic tracts, essays, workshop plans, and …

The Making And Silencing Of “Axé-Ocracy” In Brazil: Black Women Writers’ Spiritual, Political And Literary Movement In São Paulo, Sarah S. Ohmer

Publications and Research

In this article, I will focus on two influential writers from the south of Brazil, Cristiane Sobral who currently lives in Brasília, from Rio de Janeiro, and Conceição Evaristo who currently lives in Rio de Janeiro state, from Minas Gerais. I got to know them in São Paulo in 2015 at a public event: the “Afroétnica Flink! Sampa Festival of Black Thought, Literature and Culture.” I will include references to some of their younger contemporaries such as Raquel Almeida, Jenyffer Nascimento, and Elizandra Souza, all of whom reside in São Paulo, in order to illustrate the Black Brazilian women writers’ …

"Free Indirect Suicide: An Unfinished Fugue In H Minor", Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

In this lyric essay/work of creative nonfiction (listed among “Notable Essays & Literary Nonfiction” in Best American Essays 2020), Seo-Young Chu uses poetry, autotheory, and creative nonfiction to explore the generational trauma/postmemory han she inherited from her parents and the importance of destigmatizing mental illness through dialogue.

Radical Digital Media Literacy In A Post-Truth Anti-Trump Era, Alexandra Juhasz

Publications and Research

An article about Fake News Poetry workshops as radical digital media literacy given the truth of fake news.

Jenyffer Nascimento’S Epic Poetry Of Black Female Empowerment Jenyffer Nascimento: A Poesia Épica De Empoderamento Da Mulher Negra, Sarah S. Ohmer

Publications and Research

This article presents results of auto-ethnography, literary analysis, and fieldwork research to answer an underlying, perhaps unresolved, concern, relevant to this dossier: how can we produce an ethical dialogue as transnational Black Feminists, among Black Brazilian women, and North American Black women, in an ethical manner, while realizing that one may (not ever) be a part of the “carnival without you in it.” Fertile Earth/ Terra Fertil tells a long overdue epic story to an audience within the poetry: Black women, family members, other times a Black man, Brazil, white women, or “you,” undefined. Joy to pain to chaos, sensuality, …

Gathering Sense From Song: Robert Browning And The Romantic Epistemology Of Music, Laura Clarke

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Recovering The Beauty Of Medusa, Alexander M. Schlutz

Publications and Research

This essay presents a close analysis of P.B. Shelley’s fragmentary ekphrastic poem “On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci in the Florentine Gallery.” It places Shelley’s text in its aesthetic, mythological and historico-political contexts to demonstrate how Shelley aims to undo the ideological and representational structures of power that inform human language, art, and history, and which turn Medusa into the monstrous Other as which she appears. In Shelley’s text by contrast, Medusa becomes a figure for a revelatory beauty that cannot become visible in the distorting parameters of a discourse of power that informs our very perception of what …

Banshees: Poems, Eileen P. Kennedy

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

On The Origin And Future Of Poetry: Notes Towards An Investigation, Carlos Aguasaco

Publications and Research

An exploration on the historical and material conditions that allowed the emergence of metaphors and poetry alongside language. This article analyzes the historical relation between poetry and technology across history. It discusses the so-called ontological crisis of poetry and opens the conversation on its future.

Photograph: Poet On Dust Jacket, Richmond, Virginia 1996, Alexander Long

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

The Library's Bassin Collection, Scott Sheidlower, John A. Drobnicki

Publications and Research

In May 1973, York College President Milton G. Bassin donated 495 volumes to the York College Library, most of which were written in either Hebrew or Yiddish, with some also in Aramaic. The books belonged to his father, Max Bassin (who was sometimes referred to as Morris, Moses, or Moshe), who was a noted anthologist of Yiddish poetry.

Word Into Idea: The Four-Column Association And The Placket, Stephen W. Fried

Publications and Research

Two aleatory exercises in experimental poetry and prose for face-to-face classrooms are described step-by-step, In the first, a round-robin of word associations provides a lexicon from which first a poem and then a prose piece are generated and optionally shared. In the second, participants compile lists of rhyming words that are transferred to templates that position the rhyming words among blanks to be filled in. The sequence generates first a four-line poem from two triple rhymes, then a six-line poem from three triple rhymes and finally a ten-line poem from five quintuple rhymes. Results are shared on a voluntary basis.

The "Anxiety Of Influence" In Twentieth-Century Music, Joseph N. Straus

Publications and Research

The musical world of this century has been dominated, to an extraordinary and unprecedented degree, by the music of the past. Performers play music primarily by long-deceased canonical composers, composers learn their craft by studying the master-works of the past, including the distant past, and scholars devote themselves to studying increasingly ancient musical monuments. The past has never been so powerfully present as in this century. In this historical situation, composers have felt an understandably deep ambivalence toward the masterworks of the past. On the hand, those masterworks inspire admiration, even reverence. At the same time, they also inspire the …