https://arcade.stanford.edu/content/poetry-and-sociality-global-frame
Extract
Dowdy, Michael. 2013. Broken Souths: Latina/o Poetic Responses to Neoliberalism and Globalization. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. $30.00 sc. 296 pp.
Furani, Khaled. 2012. Silencing the Sea: Secular Rhythms in Palestinian Poetry. Stanford: Stanford University Press. $55.00 hc. 312 pp.
A formidable hermeticism has long held sway over Anglophone poetry criticism. While criticism of other literary genres expands its grasp, most notably into new sociological approaches to literature, knowledge of the tropes and schemes of poetry serves as a border check for those interested in poetic criticism, slowing contemporary poetry’s reception, inhibiting pedagogy, and operating in general like a canon of revealed truths. Generally speaking, to read poetry means to learn the history of poetic devices and to recognize the various appearances (or absences) of this history in an individual poem: why a line break works the way it does, why a metaphor appears where it does. But these claims about poetic design do not only represent a neutral language specific to literary study or a convenient mechanism for distinguishing between traditional and avant-garde strands of poetry. By attributing a private and individual, rather than global and material, foundation to the aesthetics of poetry, such claims also prevent poetry from being recognized as a social form. As a result, canonical notions of line, verse, and enjambment are theorized as though poetry developed and continues to develop in monastic seclusion from the political economies and emergent precarities of modern global capitalism.
No sustained analysis exists in which the history of poetry and poetics is reread in the light of the history of globalization. Books on Anglophone poetry in particular have been cautious in adopting a postcolonial, global, or transnational critical perspective and, in general, complacent in upholding the immutable value of a small set of formal devices and traditions. Within this tradition, however, there are critics who are moving toward a global and socially attuned poetics. Jahan Ramazani’s The Hybrid Muse (2001) and A Transnational Poetics (2009) link poetic tropes of metaphor and figures of irony with theories and themes of hybridity, migration, and exile in postcolonial Anglophone poetry. After Ramazani, the Jamaican poets Claude McKay and Louise Bennett can no longer be treated as marginal, neither to postcolonial studies nor to poetry, while the Irish poet W. B. Yeats and the Trinidadian poet Derek Walcott, who are already the subjects of a voluminous critical corpus, appear newly relevant.
Another extract
Furani and Dowdy are not troubled or anxious to establish their credentials through the Anglophone poetic tradition. Instead, their work provides ways outside the existing tradition and methodologies from which Anglophone critics might learn. In Silencing the Sea: Secular Rhythms of Palestinian Poetry, Furani, an anthropologist, argues that aesthetic innovations in post-1948 Palestinian poetry must be understood in relation to ethical and political “craftings of the self” (2012, 2): “I have been able to see the poetic tradition as caught in the formation and contestation of truth and subject formations in a particular society, rather than as an insular unraveling of beauty and imagination” (3). In Furani’s account, poetic meter and religion are the two critical axes for understanding Palestinian poetry in the second half of the twentieth century. The history of Palestinian verse, Furani argues, is one that links traditional meter with religion and the break from traditional meter with the rise of secularism as “a dominant fragmentary formation in ways of knowing and being in the modern era” (19). While Furani’s work introduces many poets who will be virtually unknown to those well versed in other poetic traditions, it also culminates in a powerful critique of secularism for its elevation of self-sovereignty and its claims that truth can only be found in the visible (246). Furani concludes by stressing the need “to think fully through the secular demands sensing the frailty buried under its claims of sovereignty” (248).
The most striking aspects of Silencing the Sea are the structure of argument Furani creates and the methodology he employs. The first section of the book, “Initiations,” introduces readers to the theoretical, formal, and institutional frameworks of the study by giving overviews of secularism, forms of Arabic poetry, and poetry festivals in post-1948 Palestine
How my heart speaks 