Histories & Language Traditions
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Lyric poetry may be the oldest known form of literary expression: the charm, the hymn, the ritual incantation, the riddle, the lullaby are all precursors of what we know as the lyric. These poems are recognizable across all cultures and languages, even if they are not named with equivalents of the English term “lyric.” The books, rare books, and archival materials highlighted in this section offer pathways into the diversity of lyric traditions and the surprising stories of cross-cultural lyric engagements. |
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"Ghost Dance", Forestier, facing p. 182. In the late 1880s, the new religion of the Ghost Dance spread rapidly among Native Americans throughout the American West in response to the dire conditions they faced. Forcibly moved onto reservations by the U.S. military but inspired by the revitalist vision of a Paiute shaman named Wovoka, the desperate tribes suffering from poverty, hunger, and disease embraced this last hope--the ghost-dancing rituals intended to hasten the arrival of an Indian messiah who would liberate them and usher in an all-Native future world. |
featured titles
Native Voices: Indigenous American poetry, craft and conversations
by CMarie Fuhrman & Dean Rader, editors
Tupelo Press, 2019. A groundbreaking, hybrid anthology of “Indigenous American Poetry, Craft and Conversations” that features the poems and essays of forty-four contemporary indigenous poets, this volume aims to “teach in a Native way of knowing. From Native to Native, from Native to non-Native.” It spans several tribal nations and three generations of artists — from established figures like Acoma Pueblo Simon Ortiz and Tlingit Ernestine Hayes to emerging disruptors of contemporary poetry like Chamoru Craig Santos Perez and Oglala Lakota Layli Long Soldier — and shows how poetry can be an act of resistance, remaking an “All-American” literature.
Joy and Sorrow: Songs of Ancient China
by Ha Poong Kim, translator
Sussex Academic Press, 2017. The oldest collection of classical Chinese poems, the Shijing [詩經; Book of Songs] is a compilation of over three hundred texts dating from the 11th to the 5th century BCE. The first part (the Guo feng, 國風 or ‘airs of the states’), a group of 160 poems, comprises shorter lyrics that are thought to be folk songs that describe courtship, love and longing, soldiers on war campaigns, agriculture and household management, political satire and protest. This most recent English translation follows in the footsteps of many famous renderings including those by James Legge, Marcel Granet, Arthur Waley, and Ezra Pound.
The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (4th edition)
by Roland Greene and editors
Princeton University Press, 2012. The major reference work for poetry and poetics across a wide range of literary traditions, this encyclopedia cuts across multiple historical periods and is the go-to source for students and scholars. Now in its fourth edition, its history of publication tracks an intellectual and political expansion of our understanding of what poetry is, making it an increasingly heterogenous compendium of sometimes competing visions of poetics as a field.
The Princeton Handbook of World Poetries
by Roland Greene & Stephen Cushman, editors
Princeton University Press, 2016. A selection of essays culled from the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, this anthology provides a survey of the history and practice of poetry in over 100 literary traditions from across the world with an emphasis on non-Anglophone and non-Western contexts. Originally envisioned as The Princeton Handbook of Multicultural Poetries (1996) and renamed twenty years later, the reshaping of this volume highlights a scholarly reimagining of the diversity of global poetic contexts.
West-Eastern Divan
by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe; Eric Ormsby editor & translator
Gingko Library, 2019. In 1814, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe read the poetry of the fourteenth-century Persian poet, Hafez of Shiraz, and was inspired to write his own divan (a collection of short poems) as a dialogue between German and Persian literary traditions. This collection, known as the West-Eastern Divan [West-östlicher Divan] was first published in 1819 and has since become an emblem of world literature, understood as a conversation between cultures.
A New Divan: A Lyric Dialogue between East and West
by Barbara Schwepcke and Bill Swainson, editors
Gingko Library, 2019. For the two hundredth anniversary of this volume, presented here in a new translation, twenty-four international poets (12 from the “East” paired with 12 from the “West”) were commissioned to respond to the themes in each of the twelve books of Goethe’s divan. This New Divan presents poems in eleven different languages, each with a poetic interpretation in English, opening up a new interpretation of the idea of world literature in the twenty-first century.
Strange Footing
by Seeta Chaganti
University of Chicago Press, 2018. What is it like to experience poetry through the body? Chaganti argues that for premodern audiences, poetic form emerged as an experience mediated through a culture of dance – one that engaged the irregular forces of virtual motion generated by the dancing body. She reads medieval poems through artworks, paintings and sculptural depictions of dance, suggesting a new way of reading these works—and a new theory of embodied lyric encounter.