Our panel thus responds to recent developments in the study of free verse poetry, which have underscored modernism’s formal investment in the “line.” In particular, scholars have highlighted how acts of translation and formal innovation constitute key elements within the global reception and transformation of modernism. Our respondent Liesl Yamaguchi’s new work on Stephen Mallarmé and the emergence of vers libre in France has troubled the terms by which free verse poetry’s formal innovation and sense of “crisis” might be framed at their European source. Recent research in the comparative context by Scott Mehl, our presider, has shed important light on the variety of sources from which experimental poetry and poetics emerged in Japan, illuminating the many stakes for innovation within entangled debates about translation, meter, and orality.
Inspired by these pathbreaking inquiries, our panel brings together four comparative studies on Indian, Chinese, Tibetan, Anglophone, and Russophone poetics to facilitate new conversations across interrelated formal, theoretical, and literary-historical concerns. Each presentation will last 10 minutes, followed with a 10-minute commentary by the respondent. The remaining time will be devoted to an open Q&A moderated by the presider.
Kedar A. Kulkarni will begin the panel by parsing the work of B.S. Mardhekar (1909-1956), the pre-eminent Marathi-language modernist poet. Bridging periodizations, Mardhekar’s poetry showcases the near synchronous exchange of ideas that the empire fostered. Crucially, Kulkarni shows how Mardhekar amalgamated a Sanskrit aesthetic with the imported Romantic canon to problematize the aesthetic trappings of Romanticism’s long reach in India. Through a case study on India’s last romantic and first modernist who fashioned himself in Yeats’ shadow, Mardhekar inspires us to consider how modernist lineation practices intermediated performance traditions and modern print culture.
Print media likewise figured prominently in modern Chinese innovations on the poetic line. Xiaoyu Xia will probe the typographic and prosodic ramifications of lineation in the making of Chinese “New Poetry” during its formative decades from the 1910s to the 1940s. Focusing on three key figures—Hu Shi (1891-1962), Dai Wangshu (1905-1950), and Feng Zhi (1905-1993), Xia uncovers the dual influence of local poetic traditions and Western modernist poetics on the morphology of Chinese poetic lines. She further decodes the ideological implications of freedom and necessity in modern Chinese lineation experimentations to apprehend the bond between form and history.
Just when Chinese poets were drawing inspiration from the West, the Western modernist canon evolved out of appropriations of Chinese aesthetic traditions. Bowen Wang will show how E. E. Cummings’ experimental poetics moves beyond the Poundian ideogrammic approach to East Asian aesthetics. Examining Cummings’ transmedial fusion of poetry, painting, and calligraphy, Wang reveals how the poet dissolved conventional binaries between word and image, sound and sight, discourse and representation, signification and resemblance, West and East. Situating Cummings’ radical lineation within the globalizing paradigm of modernist studies, Wang invites us to consider the poetic line as a transmedial experiment informed by intercultural aesthetics.
Finally, Nathaniel Gallant will explore the terms of experimentation around the first free-verse poem in the Tibetan language. Poet and literary scholar Dhondrup Gyel’s (1953-1985) “Waterfall of Youth” (Lang tsho’i rbab chu) emerged out of a renewed interest in Russophone poetic practices in 1980s PRC cultural production. Gallant contextualizes Gyel’s use of lineation within the diglossic poetics of Tibetan literary tradition and the broader disarticulation of Buddhist poetic genres across East Asia. Gallant thus offers comparative reflections on intersections of Russophone and Sinophone poetics, pre-modern discourses of translation between Sanskritic and Tibetan literary production, and intermedial receptions in diasporic Tibetan communities.
In response to the four papers Liesl Yamaguchi will bring Francophone contexts into conversation. Her commentary will provide salient frameworks for discussions moderated by Scott Mehl, an expert in Japanese and comparative poetics.
Together, our panel provincializes Eurocentric conceptions of the poetic line by probing the line’s plural morphologies in local, regional, and transnational traditions. Through focused discussions on lineation, we contribute intermedial and transregional perspectives to global modernisms, and explore new directions in historical and comparative poetics.