In the Wake of the Poetic

well as inject contemporary tidbits into the collective literary psyche. Most of us are familiar with the quips of Oscar Wilde and the memorable one-liners from the endless plays of William Shakespeare. So much work is done with so few words. Editors James Lough and Alex Stein have collected thirty-two contributions by a variety of writers for this project, including poet Charles Simic. Each writer offers a narrative of his or her relationship to, and experience with, aphorisms. Variations of the aphorism are included as well, like the parable, and forms that many may not be familiar with: the greguería and the Irish bull. Definitions and examples follow each, in the same manner in which a book of poetic form might instruct an emerging poet to understand and practice formal structures. Perhaps the most interesting element of the collection is the exegesis for the project, which is discussed at length in the afterword by Sara Levine, “When Very Little Is Required in the Classroom: On Teaching the Long-Winded Writer to Write Short.” This section offers insight and ideas for teaching the aphorism in a college composition classroom, where the expectation has long been to instruct students to write essays that may be anywhere from five to twenty-five pages in length. Even in colleges , we may experience the instruction of brevity more so than in the past. So in a time where the Victorian three-volume novel has lost popularity, the penetrating effectiveness of the aphorism continues to thrive. Sarah Warren University of North Texas Miscellaneous Najat Rahman. In the Wake of the Poetic: Palestinian Artists after Darwish. Syracuse University Press. 2015. 190 pages. This book is not about the great Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish (1941–2008) but is, in many ways, a tribute to him and his poetry, which engaged Arabs everywhere and especially Palestinian poets and artists and resonated further on the international scene (see page 00). Najat Rahman examines here the works of a select number of Palestinian spokenword poets, performance artists, visual artists, and musicians who are contemporaries of Darwish in the two decades since the Oslo Accords (1993 and 1995). In rigorous detail, she analyzes their aesthetic founded on loss, dispersion, dispossession , and transformation engendered by the politics of Palestinian cultural expression . Like Darwish, they are shown to assert a common legacy: historic Palestine, the national poets, the Nakba of 1948, and the memory of the 1982 Beirut war—this legacy being considered as the basis of a new belonging. Despite inimical forces intending their effacement, Palestinians are shown, through modalities of art and poetry, to persist in belonging to the land Pia Tafdrup Salamander Sun and Other Poems Trans. David McDuff Bloodaxe Books / Dufour Editions This book compiles the two most recent collections from Danish poet Pia Tafdrup. The first, The Migrant Bird’s Compass, is a meditation on travel, ranging from the geographical to the spiritual. The second, Salamander Sun, contains sixty poems representing each year of the poet’s life. McDuff’s translation of Tafdrup’s poetry is uncluttered and maintains a personal approachability consistent with the content. Norman R. Shapiro Fe-lines: French Cat Poems through the Ages Illus. Olga Pastuchiv University of Illinois Press Well-known poets such as Baudelaire and others who have never been translated into English explore the complicated relationship with man’s best frenemy and Internet obsession, the cat. With beautiful illustrations and poems of every age and form, this book will please everyone (except dog lovers). Nota Bene WORLDLITERATURETODAY.ORG 93 of their ancestors and in having a strong identity of their own. Although contemporary Palestinian poets have been studied to some degree, and books and articles have been published about them, Palestinian performance artists , visual artists, and musicians have not been studied as much. Rahman tries to redress the balance in this small book of 190 pages, and she believes they all represent contemporary Palestinian political conditions and, as importantly, Palestinian aesthetics. Furthermore, she demonstrates in analytical detail that they continue Darwish’s vision and poetic legacy, and she convincingly argues that their work is nonetheless original and not derivative. To show that the political in good poetry and art

Aphorism · Art · Art history · Epistemology · Exegesis · Literature · Narrative · Poetry · Popularity · Psyche · History · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Middle East and Rwanda Conflicts · Middle East Politics and Society · Philosophy · Psychology

• The Visual Poetry of the Work”

  Open Access•Jeffrey J Sacks•Critical Times•2022

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