Poetries - Politics: A Celebration of Language, Art, and Learning

By Susan Lawrence, Mary Shaw, Francois Cornilliat and 4 more

Poetries – Politics: A Celebration of Language, Art, and Learning celebrates the best of innovative humanities pedagogy and creative graphic design. Designed and implemented during a time of political divisiveness, the Poetries – Politics project created a space of inviting, multilingual walls on the Rutgers campus, celebrating diversity, community, and cross-cultural exchange. This book, like the original project, provides a platform for the incredible generative power of student-led work. Essays feature the perspectives of three students and professors originally involved in the project, reflecting on their learning and exploring the works they selected for the original exhibition. The essays lead to a beautifully illustrated catalogue of the original student designs.

Reproduced in full color and with the accompanying poems in both their original language and a translation, this catalogue commemorates the incredible creative spirit of the project and provides a new way of contemplating these great poetic works.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: Feb 10, 2023
• ISBN: 9781978832732

Susan Lawrence

Susan Lawrence is a professor of archaeology at La Trobe University and has spent thirty years studying the goldfields. She is the author of Dolly’s Creek: An Archaeology of a Victorian Goldfields Community and, with Peter Davies, An Archaeology of Australia since 1788.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

JENEVIEVE DELOSSANTOS

A People become impoverished

and servile,

when taken from them

the language

endowed by their fathers:

is lost forever.

Now I understand

as I finger the

guitar frets

of the dialect

that each day

another chord is lost.

—FROM LANGUAGE AND DIALECT, IGNAZIO BUTTITTA (1899–1997)

SICILIAN POET IGNAZIO BUTTITTA wrote the lines above as part of his 1970 poem Language and Dialect (fig. I.1). A moving reflection on the profound loss of one’s native language, Buttitta’s words suggest that the very soul of the Sicilian people, the spirit of the populous is starved at the loss of its mother tongue. That jarring loss of culture, the guitar frets of the dialect missing chords, echoes the cacophonous quality of graphic design student Devon Monaghan’s (Mason Gross 2018) design for a poster she created to visually interpret the work as part of the Poetries – Politics project. A striking contrast of royal blue and marigold, the dizzying layers of broken words, piles of yellow letters layered upon each other set the background for two arresting eyes that confront our gaze. Tears of light blue text, the English translation of the poem found center, stream from the striking stare as they lead our eye to the powerful image of a physically censored mouth where a blue X obscures the figure’s ability to speak and contains a jumbled mix of the English and Sicilian titles of the poem. This anonymous figure is both no one and everyone as it visually emerges from and is consumed by the dizzying array of disorderly broken words. Together, the poem and the poignant design give us a visceral sense of the pain in confronting broken language, broken culture, and broken spirit.

For me, as an art historian and editor of this book project, this poster and its featured poem capture the essence of Poetries – Politics. In coming together, the textual and the visual give new life, create a wholly new work of art that provides the viewer-reader with material for deep contemplation. Moreover, the self-referential nature of this poster that manipulates words and letters into visual forms and depicts a poem about language itself, speaks to the heart of this project: the power of both poetry and the visual arts, of words and images, both languages themselves to connect, communicate, divide, and unify.

The Poetries – Politics project originated in the Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences (SAS) under the guidance of French professor Mary Shaw and became a 1.5-credit interdisciplinary course charged with the Herculean task of mounting a campus exhibition and hosting an interdisciplinary, multilingual conference exploring the richness of exceptional international poetry in fall 2017. Each of the course’s sixteen students, studying an array of arts and sciences disciplines, became a student-curator for the semester, taking responsibility for select language groups. Yet although in charge of the collection, each student embarked on a remarkable process of both traditional research and crowdsourcing new information and interpretations of these poetic works. Working with their respective communities and culling information from a multitude of sources, students ultimately drafted a series of informative design briefs that would serve as the basis for the exquisite posters created under the direction of graphic design professor Atif Akin from the Mason Gross School of the Arts. These originally designed, hybrid poster-poems include poetic works in their native languages accompanied with English- or French-language translations. For each poem/translation pair selected and researched by the student-curators, graphic design students then arranged the text and combined them with images or integrated them into original designs that add new interpretive layers to the poems, explore the nuanced shifts that occur with translation, and speak to the generative power of pairing text with image. The poster-poems are reproduced in the present volume, representing rich, inspiring examples of student-led, student-generated, creative innovation.¹ Reaching across disciplines and schools, this project resulted not just in the critical analysis of poems but in the inventive creation of new works of art, exploring the interconnectedness of art and poetry as expressive media.

Ancient Roman poet Horace is credited with the famous phrase ut pictura poesis, or as is painting, so is poetry.² The parallel expressive qualities of both mediums were put in competition against each other through the Renaissance, and the careful contemplation of their histories has structured traditional liberal arts education through the Enlightenment and beyond. Whether fine art, design, or popular visual culture like advertisements, cinema, and television, the formal qualities of line, shape, color, contrast, and scale evoke both analysis and pathos; they can convey the intangible in ways distinct from the expressive power of words alone. Likewise, poetry, through its formal elements of rhythm and style, liberates language; it allows it to communicate with aesthetic intensity, often evoking the abstract and ethereal. Despite this competition, both language and art bring people together. They link us as a community and empower us to share, connect, emote, and express. Word and image give life to emotions and form to human intellect, and in this way can often be mobilized as political agents. Language and image as markers of difference, as forms of demonstrating otherness, as ways of exemplifying educational prowess and forms of both providing and withholding a sense of belonging, have shaped history and culture across both time and the globe.

It is at this intersection of the poignancy of poetic language, the expressive power of the visual, and the effect of insightful political commentary that the true essence of the Poetries – Politics project surfaces. As a poetry scholar and a poet herself, Professor Shaw initiated and designed this course at a time of heightened political crisis. As she discusses in her essay, "Why Poetries – Politics?," she envisioned Poetries – Politics as a way to engage students in some of the world’s most important works of political poetry and to engage with political concepts expressed in the medium throughout time and space. The innovative pedagogical approach to teach poetry and history through collaboration paid off rich, unexpected dividends. It grew into a project that would become as political as the works it featured, materializing into the exquisitely designed posters illustrated here, and taking physical form as an exhibition in the then–newly erected Academic Building on Rutgers University’s College Avenue Campus. A building that featured imposing white walls and long stretches of windows, the space was perfect for this transformative exhibition. Rather than think of walls that set boundaries and create separations, a theme that was overtly political in the aftermath of the 2016 election’s immigration policies, these walls would become home to an inclusive array of languages and cultures, and give life to the collaborative work of the Rutgers community, turning barriers into celebrations of cultural and historical diversity. Moreover, the autonomy granted to the students in choosing materials, exploring ways to conduct research, and running this project fostered a palpable sense of student ownership and engagement. That absorption is reflected in the breadth of this project, which expanded from the classroom not just into a two-day colloquium in 2017 but into accompanying process films executed by a collaboration with Rutgers film students and a formal and more permanent reinstallation (fig. I.2) of the exhibition in the College Avenue Academic Building, and, over three years later, it now pursues a global outreach in the form of this book.

Rutgers University–New Brunswick is home to over seventy-one thousand students, from over 125 countries and all fifty states and a huge population of students who are multilingual; it is one of the most diverse campuses in the country. The breadth of Poetries – Politics reflects this diversity, featuring over forty languages that span the globe across Middle Eastern, South Asian, East Asian, North and South American, and European cultures. At its core, the politics of this project are to use Rutgers as a locus of cross-cultural inclusion both literally through the spaces on its physical campus referenced above and in the less tangible spaces of community and exchange necessitated by a project with this remarkable breadth and reach. Poetries – Politics celebrates not just the diversity of our community but reaches far beyond it, creating new works of political poster-poems that explore common themes in the human condition throughout time and space for the contemplation of viewers of all kinds to