Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Observations From The Edge Of The Abyss, Peter Johnson

English Faculty Publications

A book of prose poems/fragments available to download here for no charge

Bouncing Back: Resilience And Its Limits In Late-Age Composing, Louise Wetherbee Phelps

English Faculty Publications

This essay is one of a series on my mother’s late-age composing, studying a writing project she started at age 70 and worked on for more than 25 years. Her intention was to integrate extensive reading, personal experience, and cultural observations to explain changes in parenting (and, by extension, education and enculturation of the next generation) from her childhood in the 1920s through the 2000s. When she died at 97, she left behind a 75-page draft, but was unable to complete her plans for revisions and an ending. I focus here on identifying the multiple factors in the ecology of …

Reading The Gaps: On Women’S Nonfiction And Page Space, Amie S. Reilly

English Faculty Publications

Recently, I read Maggie O’Farrell’s book I am I am I am, wherein she writes seventeen different essays, all describing ways she has nearly died. Each essay is named for a part of the body and, in parenthesis, the year the event that nearly killed her occurred. Certain body parts are used more than once (“Lungs,” for example, since there are three occasions when O’Farrell nearly drowned). After reading, I was stuck on the idea that she broke her body up into pieces in order to tell a complete story, that some parts needed to be touched twice, that …

Anthropomorphize, Amie S. Reilly

English Faculty Publications

Jules is twenty-nine. She is sitting in her cold car, in a parking garage attached to the building where she works, in the concrete and leaded glass city of New Haven, the only anthropologist involved in a study of capuchin monkeys. The monkeys are being taught to exchange coins for fruit. Most of her coworkers are men, some are psychologists, and the others are economists. The economists call the monkeys “insatiable stomachs of want” and the psychologists call them “pre-capitalistic mind models” and although she knows better, Jules calls them each by human names. In the mornings, a zoology graduate …

A Potted History Of Fevers (The Just War Was Slow Weather), Mark Anthony Cayanan

English Faculty Publications

The poem is a part of a sequence that loosely revolves around the Agoo apparitions in the early 1990s.

Poems From Ecstasy Facsimile, Mark Anthony Cayanan

English Faculty Publications

The poem is part of a sequence that textually draws from the biography of Teresa of Avila.

Occluded World, Mark Anthony Cayanan

English Faculty Publications

The poem is part of a manuscript in progress loosely tethered to the Agoo apparitions during the early 1990s.

Dear America (American Dream), Luisa Igloria

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

I Planted The Sun In The Middle Of The Sky Like A Flag: In And Of Etel Adnan’S Arab Apocalypse, Hilary Plum

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Fruit Fly, Amie S. Reilly

English Faculty Publications

A fruit fly has been hovering around my face for days, though maybe it isn’t the same fruit fly, since I’ve been told that fruit flies only live for twenty-four hours, yet there it is ...

‘To Sing The Haiku The American Way Is A Beautiful Thing’: The Haiku Of Etheridge Knight, Thomas Lewis Morgan

English Faculty Publications

This essay takes up Etheridge Knight’s haiku as a means to trace his “major metaphor” of prison as a form of postcolonial cross-cultural haiku poetics. Knight’s haiku often focus on those that are voiceless along with the systems that work to disenfranchise them, using their experiences and conditions to engage the unequal power dynamics silently perpetuating inequality. In mapping out the explicit and implicit walls that position the hierarchies present in Knight’s haiku, and connecting these to his published comments on the role and function of haiku within his own poetic imagination, we can better understand Knight’s interest in re-imagining …

Drift, Luisa Igloria

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Animus, Luisa Igloria

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

'It's You Who Are. What? / A Hummingbird.' And 'No Longer Was He Young And Raw Though The Error Remained Young And Raw', Mark Anthony Cayanan

English Faculty Publications

The two poems belong to a lyric sequence that loosely tracks the emotive trajectory of Thomas Mann's Death in Venice.

As Aschenbach ('Who Setting Out To Voyage Must Have Imagined Which Shores To Avoid'), Mark Anthony Cayanan

English Faculty Publications

The poem is part of a manuscript I am currently working on, which is my attempt to project a mode of disclosure, even as the method of composition, involving the liberal extraction and combination of passages from several urtexts, works against this seeming tonality. The poem loosely channels the consciousness of Gustav von Aschenbach. Among the intertexts I've used are Death in Venice by Thomas Mann, translated by Stanley Appelbaum

Poems From 'I Look At My Body And See The Source Of My Shame: Ecstasy Facsimile ('My Favorite Saint Tells Me I Complain Too Often About My Soul's Shortcomings' And 'We Own None Of It'), Mark Anthony Cayanan

English Faculty Publications

The poems are part of a manuscript I'm currently working on, which is my attempt to project a mode of disclosure, even as the method of composition--which involves the liberal extraction and combination of passages from several intertexts--works against this seeming tonality. The poems contain passages from The Life of Saint Teresa of vila (1957) by herself, translated by J. M. Cohen.

Poem From I Look At My Body And See The Source Of My Shame: Ecstasy Facsimile ("Rescue Me After The Gangrenous Limb's Been Cut Off"), Mark Anthony Cayanan

English Faculty Publications

The poem is part of a manuscript I'm currently working on, which is my attempt to project a mode of disclosure, even as the method of composition--which involves the liberal extraction and combination of passages from several intertexts--works against this seeming tonality. The poem contains passages from The Life of Saint Teresa of vila (1957) by herself, translated by J. M. Cohen.

Motus Animi Continuus, Mark Anthony Cayanan

English Faculty Publications

The poem part of a manuscript I'm currently working on, which is my attempt to project a mode of disclosure, even as the method of composition, involving the liberal extraction and combination of passages from several urtexts, works against this seeming tonality. The poem loosely channels the consciousness of Gustav von Aschenbach. Among the intertexts I've used are Death in Venice by Thomas Mann, translated by Stanley Appelbaum.

Ursa Minor, Amie S. Reilly

English Faculty Publications

In the last minutes of sleep, Nick dreamed a bear crawled out of his mouth and he woke up scratching at his beard, unsure whether he feared birth or death. He reached below the bed where yesterday’s checkered chef pants were still in a heap on the floor and pulled them on even though he wasn’t a chef. He worked at the deli in the supermarket.

Pagtatatag Ng Tradisyon At Kumbensiyon: Ang Soap Opera Sa Radyo, 1922-1963, Louie Jon A. Sanchez

English Faculty Publications

Ang soap opera, sa pagpapakilala rito sa bansa ng mga Americano sa midyum ng radyo, ay mahihiwatigang nahinuha at tinanggap batay sa tradisyonal at kombensiyonal nitong pagkakaanyo at kagamitan. Isa itong sunuran at bukás (open-ended) na naratibong nailalako’t nabubúhay sa napagkakakitahang tangkilik.

Outside A Binary System, The Brighter Object Is A Dream, Luisa A. Igloria

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Poems From I Look At My Body And See The Source Of My Shame: Ecstasy Facsimile ("Canvasbacks Will Swim In The Polluted River," "Meanwhile, Real Life," And "The River Is A Stadium"), Mark Anthony Cayanan

English Faculty Publications

The three poems are part of a manuscript I'm currently working on, which is my attempt to project a mode of disclosure, even as the method of composition--which involves the liberal extraction and combination of passages from several intertexts--works against this seeming tonality. All the poems contain passages from The Life of Saint Teresa of vila (1957) by herself, translated by J. M. Cohen.

Six Poems From I Look At My Body And See The Source Of My Shame: ("We've Arranged Our Lives," "My Soul, Steeped In My Pride," "The World Is A Funny House," "My Joy From You Lives Free," "Our Hunger Like A Cockroach," And "Nothing Is Ever Clean In Me"), Mark Anthony Cayanan

English Faculty Publications

Six Poems from I Look at My Body and See the Source of My Shame: ("We've arranged our lives," "My soul, steeped in my pride," "The world is a funny house," "My joy from you lives free," "Our hunger like a cockroach," and "Nothing is ever clean in me")

Bad Harvest, Dzvinia Orlowsky

English Faculty Publications

This powerful sixth collection of poetry is like some kind of new world Genesis singing its stories with lyric, grace, comic intuition and tragic force. The poet leads us over the remains of drought, along empty riverbeds that run parallel to failure and death, but then twists to capture a more elusive truth, pluck one last grain to hold, redeeming a bad harvest to sow hope in this soiled world. Bad Harvest burns like revelation.

Poems From "Sentence", Mark Anthony Cayanan

English Faculty Publications

The three poems are from a sonnet sequence titled "Sentence."

The Letters, Alicia Defonzo

English Faculty Publications

[First paragraph]

“You know, your grandmother only wrote me once during the war?” he says, sipping his scotch, staring out at the Chesapeake Bay which he can no longer see. I look at him with her eyes. It was the first I heard of it. He wouldn’t lie to me, but I wonder how this could be true.

Foreword To Visual Imagery, Metadata, And Multimodal Literacies Across The Curriculum, Jonas Zdanys

English Faculty Publications

As one of those educated to consider the primacy of the word – written and spoken – as the vehicle for creating and transferring knowledge, I am often surprised by the evidence around me that we live in a world inwhich technological devices of variousshapes and sizes have blunted the reliance on the layerings of words to define and engage in favor of various shortcuts to knowledge. Complexity of expression in the textures of language has given way, because of those devices and their applications, to abbreviations, neologisms, emojis, deliberate misspellings, instagrams, tweets, and other avenues of expression that focus …

Sexual/Textual Politics In The Women Of Ophelia A. Dimalanta’S Poems, Ma. Socorro Q. Perez

English Faculty Publications

The study attempts to show that while Ophelia A. Dimalanta’s excellent New Critical training and education have rendered her a quintessential poet conscious of form, technique, and craftsmanship, which in turn, has been foregrounded by her equally New Critical-trained colleagues, this New Critical tradition has limited the study of her oeuvre to artistic structure and form, glossing over myriad concerns that the poems may have. The present study, in turn, has recuperated form, technique, and genre to encode the feminism that undergirds her poetic vision. Foregrounding Dimalanta’s vision enfleshed in art, the study recuperates the sexual/textual politics in Dimalanta’s Lady …

Infinite Regress And The Illusion Of Actuality And Participation In Borges's 'The Aleph', Robin Mcallister

English Faculty Publications

Borges wants his reader to use imagination to participate in his fiction, to imagine the vision of the universe as an Aleph. The vision of the Aleph is paradoxical, impossible, inexpressible—a point in space, in the basement of a house in Buenos Aires, where all other points in the universe are simultaneously present. The reader sees the Aleph—or the illusion of the Aleph, watching it emerge as if through Borges’ own eyes, as an unrequited lover and frustrated poet gradually accommodating the infinite vision to the limitations of actual perception. The illusion of actual presence the reader evokes seems to …

Composing Focus: Shaping Temporal, Social, Media, Social Media, And Attentional Environments, Jane Fife

English Faculty Publications

Writers must learn to control factors that influence the ability to focus, especially in what some call a culture of distraction. In our efforts to promote metacognition and flexible writing processes, writing teachers need to engage students in study and discussion of factors in our temporal, social, media, social media, and attentional environments that influence focus while composing. This article examines these facets of our contemporary scenes of writing by reviewing recent research in composition studies and psychology about writing and attention, discussing the results of a survey of undergraduate writers’ composing practices, and sharing insights from assignments that help …