Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Hearts Go Walking: Conversations Between Poetry, Prayer And Theology, Vaughan S. Roberts

Vaughan S Roberts

The Supreme Fiction: Fiction Or Fact?, Gregory Brazeal

Gregory Brazeal

The article makes a case for giving up the quest to identify Wallace Stevens’ “supreme fiction.” The poet hoped to usher in the creation of an idea that would serve as a fictive replacement for the idea of God, known to be fictive but willfully believed. His hope has remained unfulfilled. By the poet’s own explicit standards, the supreme fiction does not appear in any of his poems, nor in his poetry as a whole, nor in poetry in general. The very idea of a supreme fiction may depend, at least in part, upon a problematic conception of belief drawn …

Wallace Stevens' Philosophical Evasions, Gregory Brazeal

Gregory Brazeal

How could thought ever benefit from being formed in poetic language rather than philosophical prose? This essay attempts to clarify a single, relatively narrow respect in which poetry can perform philosophical work that prose, as such, cannot: the evasion of philosophical dogmatism through Stevensian qualification. What Helen Vendler in an early essay calls Stevens’ “qualified assertions,” and what Marjorie Perloff calls Stevens’ “ironic modes," are the basic techniques of Wallace Stevens' anti-dogmatic art.

The Non-Turning Of Recent American Poetry On David Caplan's Questions Of Possibility: Centemporary Poetry And Poetic Form, Michael Theune

Michael Theune

David Caplan’s Questions of Possibility: Contemporary Poetry and Poetic Form (Oxford University Press, 2005) is a good and necessary book that teaches or reinforces some vital lessons about poetry and poetic form. According to Caplan, his book is a necessary corrective, a check on “our current understanding of poetic form, especially contemporary metrical verse” which Caplan describes as emerging from the ever-perpetuated, and perpetuating, over-simplified binaries of the poetry wars—open/closed, Language/New Formalist—and which Caplan labels simply adequate.”

Originally published in Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing and used with permission.

Constructing Indigenousness In The Late Modern World, Robert Cribb, Li Narangoa

Robert Cribb

Examines changing meanings of the term 'indigenous" in relation to other ideas that have been valued in various (mainly Western) philosophical system, such as priority, attachment to the land, and technical knowledge.

It Not Do Fall For: On The Paradelle, Michael Theune

Michael Theune

With the invention of the paradelle form by poet Billy Collins and the furtherance of the paradelle in Theresa M. Welford’s The Paradelle: An Anthology (Red Hen Press, 2005), a new hoax has entered poetry’s domain. However, while somewhat similar to Warner’s hoaxes, the paradelle hoax is in many ways unique, and uniquely problematic—though increasingly interesting.

Originally published in Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing and used with permission.

Stevens In The 1930s, Alan Filreis

Alan Filreis

An overview of Wallace Stevens' poetic response to radical poets and ideas in the American 1930s.

Lines For A Colleague (Frank Slagle, 1947-2006), Frank Pommersheim

Frank Pommersheim

No abstract provided.