Anxiety in Isolation: Anointing with Ecocentrism

Multiple stressors such as apprehension of climate change, the anxiety of living in polluted cities, and the dread of COVID-19 are affecting the tranquility and stability of human existence. People are in "isolation” in one form or the other-whether virtually "confined” within a hazy shell of anxiety or literally in self-quarantine to escape from a deadly virus. People who are already experiencing some kind of mental ailment as well as those who do not have any past record of such illness, are both experiencing mental trauma that may range from just feeling sad to having more intense bouts of anxiety and depression. Ecocentrism could perhaps provide an answer to such afflictions. Identifying with Nature might enable people to emerge from the stranglehold of loneliness and move into the tranquil realm of solitude. Thus, one would remain alone, but with a difference. A green reading of ecocentric poetry could provide the key. This chapter aims to delve into this domain, studying poets from diverse parts of the world, and writing in different languages. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022.

Poetry and prose: Mediating and modeling faculty member mental health and wellness

The COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 has resulted in an amplified focus on mental health and wellness for post-secondary education students, educators, and administrators. Knowledge regarding the mental health and wellness of educators and administrators within post-secondary institutions and the support mechanisms available are limited, but during this time of crisis have become increasingly necessary. Relationships and interactions that were once organic in nature are now occurring through alternative virtual methods, and we propose that communal creative writing provides a space for building rapport and reenergizing ourselves and our students. A Creative Writing Community established within a Faculty of Education is mediating and modeling the types of critical-collaborative spaces needed for pre-service teachers and adult/mature educators and researchers in a post-COVID-19 pandemic world. Unnecessary divides between creative and academic approaches to writing are bridged as the skills and techniques required to compose poetry and prose reveal an innovative and independent means of expression with the potential to promote mental health and wellness among post-secondary education stakeholders. This poetic inquiry case study delivers practical recommendations for facilitating community problem-solving, promoting educator and administrator well-being, and developing pedagogical/andragogical solutions and strategies for application within online and remote teaching and learning platforms. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021. All rights reserved.

Processing Uncertainty During COVID-19: A Collaborative Autoethnography of Two Stranded International Ph.D. Students

COVID-19 has transformed the world in diverse ways, presenting ongoing challenges. One of these challenges has been a profound sense of uncertainty. In this chapter, the authors from India/France and Iran explore their experiences of uncertainty as international students working on their Ph.D.s away from their Australian university. The authors engaged in collaborative autoethnography to present their stories as research poems. Interspersed with interpretations, the poems attempt to unravel the shared and diverse ways in which the authors contextually processed uncertainty. Finally, the authors underscore ways in which university and government actors can further support international Ph.D. students to address their specific needs during and post-pandemic periods. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022.

The Role of Poetry in Promoting a Sustainability Mindset: Walter Benjamin as a Guide Toward a Slow Journey

The emergence of highly complex sustainability challenges in modern society has led to the necessity of searching for more effective approaches to education for sustainable development. Research has shown that reflection leads toward more profound levels of engagement with respect to sustainable actions. Therefore, higher education has a role to play in stimulating reflection in light of sustainability. Art-based techniques, which have not been included alongside traditional teaching methods, have begun to gain the attention of researchers and teachers in higher education as they produce a deeper impact and involvement and can have a positive influence on the minds and hearts of the students. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that poetry can contribute to integrating the arts and humanities in management education. The potential effect of poetry on business management majors is being explored as a part of their Corporate Social Responsibility course. Poetry has considerable potential as an innovative approach to teach sustainability, but it is rather unusual in business education. Poetry was chosen as an enabler for reflection and emotions. This original teaching project was followed by a research project relying on reflective assignments. A rereading of Walter Benjamin's Illuminations from the perspective of sustainability studies was a source of inspiration, in particular "Theses on the Philosophy of History,” "The Storyteller” and "Unpacking My Library.” The paper assumes that Benjamin's ideas relate to a slow journey involving "awakening,” "wisdom” and "in a process,” three elements that are at the core of promoting a sustainability mindset. The research project consisted of four reflection assignments students had to comply with: reading and interpreting poetry;searching for a poem which would be most appropriate for the discussed sustainability topic;creating their own poem and reflecting on the whole task. The research took place in the second semester of 2020 and first semester of 2021, all in COVID-19 pandemic context. Students' participation was not mandatory, but the majority joined. Their perceptions and impressions reinforce the existing knowledge about the emotional power of poetry to encourage reflection. The results show that poetry plays a relevant role in encouraging future managers to develop a frame of mind that incorporates sustainability and responsibility. Business students are open to this approach because it adds a new and unexpected dimension to their studies. Despite the urge to integrate reflections, this is still an exception for the majority of management courses. The results suggest that poetry is a relevant instrument to promote a more sustainable mindset among future managers. Paradoxically, by emphasizing a slow journey, i.e., allowing time for integrating reflective practices, a transition toward sustainability in daily managerial processes can be accelerated. Copyright © 2021 Molderez, Baraniuk and Lambrechts.

Saturday Night Seder by Erich Bergen et al., and: Mishkan HaSeder, A Passover Haggadah ed. by Rabbi Hara E. Person and Jessica Greenbaum (review)

In the wake of 9/11, for instance, the Union for Reform Judaism rapidly posted a "Survivor Tree Planting Ceremony," a memorial service for religious schools, an interfaith dialogue guide, and readings and prayers for congregations and individuals. [...]for many Jewish Americans, the virtual Passover of 2020 was the gateway experience for so many other online forms of Judaism that followed: live-streamed prayer services attended by thousands across time zones, Zoom gatherings for weddings, brisses, baby namings, funerals, and shivas. [...]first I copied down the last stanza of "Passover Love Poem" (147), a poem by Rabbi Person, knowing it was just right to contribute to my second (and hopefully last) Zoom Seder: "This is more than a recipe for nostalgia.

A Poetry Lifeline Across Hemispheres Through Crises. Conversation/Interchange: Some Days The Bird

When I picked it up at AWP 2016 (the Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference held each year in the U.S.), I fell in love with the dozen poems they published as part of their exchange. [...]when Heather approached me about a poetry collaboration just before Christmas of that annus horribilis we were all racing to adios, how could I decline? I swept aside the teetering pile of work and doctoral deadlines, shut the door on the clamouring domestic to-do list and neatly packaged up the most pressing obstacle in a small envelope sealed with sticky-tape and shoved into a bottom drawer. Surely not an obstacle in the writing of a book centred around gardens, I hypothesised as the carrot of conversing in verse with Heather dangled so tantalisingly. Because of these missives across the Pacific, I could imagine her father's garden in Ireland and the pain of her separation from him during Australia's lengthy lockdown, and she could empathise with my care and concerns for my own beloved father, whom we lost earlier this year.

Sinophone verses from lyrical (e)scapes: an accountofpoetics and polesisin distress

The initial outburst of the pandemic, in early 2020, forced China and the rest of the world into seclusion, anxiety, social alienation. In the Sinosphere, a human response to the aporia of isolation is the lyrical production, a prosperous literary activity through which the individual gives shape to a collective consciousness. The present paper examines a collection of Sinophone verses sprung from the Covid-19 threat and dismay, as a psychic necessity to re-organize the perception of the outer world. Specifically, it studies a body offifty-two poems composed by twelve lyrical Sinophone voices. oublished in Chinese in a spring number of the respected literary journal Jintian, This investigation primarily focuses on the cultural, aesthetic, and psychological value of a lyrical polyphony embodied by unchained Sinophone voices, which sing against the background of a common predicament. In parallel, it reads the collection as a collective memory and a cultural repository, engendered by a narrative projection of experience: to that end, it combines a narratological approach with the observation of certain lyrical features of a "poetics of distress".

A poetic autoethnography of when poetry became my synergistic approach for pedagogy and andragogy

As an early career educator with various teaching roles in the U.S. higher education context and as an international student from India, the author's research interests are second language writing, multicultural literacy development, and equality and equity in language education. This poetic autoethnographic chapter focuses on two social identities: (1) teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL) scholar and (2) international multilingual student. It elaborates on the author's experiences of finding solace in poetry when there was emotional uncertainty in the author's life as an early career teacher during the COVID-19 pandemic. The chapter focuses on how the author managed the stress of beginning PhD studies during the same time. Throughout this poetic autoethnographic inquiry, it uses the poems the author wrote during the semester of spring 2021 as data. The poems include lilts of identities, which include the legal status that an F-1 (i.e., nonimmigrant) student visa, the race the author belongs to, the "accented" English (i.e., Indian English), the skin color, and the stress experienced related to COVID-19. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

MotherScholar Work on #StopAsianHate during COVID-19

A poem is presented.

Vox Poetica: bringing an arts-based research method to school leaders' lockdown experiences

The work of school leaders during lockdown has been emotionally charged and emotionally draining, affecting immediate well-being and longer term career plans. To communicate the emotions that we were told about and which were obvious during interviews with serving headteachers, we turned to arts-informed methods. We used poems made from transcripts to complement and supplement the analysis of 58 interviews and survey responses (n = 1491). This paper introduces the use of transcript poetry and explains our choice of method. The poems foreground the diversity that existed among the leaders, and different kinds of interventions that might make a difference. Our example suggests that the educational leadership, management and administration field might benefit from further experimentation with arts-based methods.

the disease of expertise

The Disease of Expertise, is a poem composed by poet, playwright, musician and researcherTawona Sitholé. Within the poem,Sitholé challenges the contemporary constructs of modernity, knowledge, and knowledge production in the scope of globalized economies. Utilizing Covid-19 and the corresponding global pandemic as a backdrop into the inquiry of knowledge, and economic development Sitholé incorporates his own lived experience and local knowledge to highlight contemporary issues relating to globalization, structural inequities, and questions of knowledge within the Global South.

Silent Footsteps: Renga Poetry as a Collaborative, Creative Research Method Reflecting on the Immobilities of Gender-Based Violence in the Covid-19 Pandemic

In the Covid-19 global crisis, gender-based violence (GBV) has been reshaped and reconfigured, with increases in some places and decreases in others. During our exploration of the changes in GBV through trans/feminist collaborative reflexive storying, we noticed the fragmentary nature of our storied recollections, which both represented and heightened the emotions in the work. With an intention of distilling the words even further, we challenged ourselves, as transdisciplinary researchers, to create a collaborative renga poem, which we titled, "Silent Footsteps.” An ancient Japanese form, the renga is a series of short, linked verses. This article demonstrates that renga offers an accessible, collaborative poetic research method, not only for research teams but also for non-academic groups to connect with each other. It has the ability to convey deep emotion, with an authentic personal voice, while being confined to structure and rules. Along with creating two stanzas each turn in a round of emails, we all wrote a reflection to engage with the process that identifies this method of writing research as holistic and creative, able to further connect the authors, reflect on the new knowledge and meaning that this work has motivated. Based on these reflections, which are woven throughout and on the renga poem, which is presented in full at the end, we argue that (a) renga is a timely poetic form, (b) it enhances transdisciplinary collaboration, and (c) that it offers both resistance and catharsis.

From ‘Ouvert Oeuvre: Openings'

Inscribing what Levinas might call ‘espace vital' (the space we can survive), ‘Ouvert Oeuvre: Openings', (written/composed by Adeena Karasick and visualized/designed by Warren Lehrer), is an ecstatically wrought, never quite post-COVID-19 celebration/exploration of openings. It tracks the pain of openings read through socio-economic, geographic and bodily space. Employing fragmentation, layered language and sonic wordplay, these excerpts explore a range of intralingual etymologies of the word ‘opening', laced with post-consumerist ironic and erotic language, theoretical discourse, philosophical and Kabbalistic aphorisms, ‘Ouvert Oeuvre: Openings' foregrounds language as a material, physical organ-ism of hope – highlighting the concept of opening as an ever-swirling palimpsest of spectral voices, textures, whispers and codes transporting us through passion, politics and pleasure as we negotiate loss and light. The full volume is forthcoming from Lavender Ink Press, Spring 2023. © 2023 Intellect Ltd Poetry. English language.

Poetry in Pandemic: A Multimodal Neuroaesthetic Study on the Emotional Reaction to the Divina Commedia Poem

Poetry elicits emotions, and emotion is a fundamental component of human ontogeny. Although neuroaesthetics is a rapidly developing field of research, few studies focus on poetry, and none address its different modalities of fruition (MOF) of universal cultural heritage works, such as the Divina Commedia (DC) poem. Moreover, alexithymia (AX) resulted in being a psychological risk factor during the COVID-19 pandemic. The present study aims to investigate the emotional response to poetry excerpts from different cantica (Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso) of DC with the dual objective of assessing the impact of both the structure of the poem and MOF and that of the characteristics of the acting voice in experts and non-experts, also considering AX. Online emotion facial coding biosignal (BS) techniques, self-reported and psychometric measures were applied to 131 literary (LS) and scientific (SS) university students. BS results show that LS globally manifest more JOY than SS in both reading and listening MOF and more FEAR towards Inferno. Furthermore, LS and SS present different results regarding NEUTRAL emotion about acting voice. AX influences listening in NEUTRAL and SURPRISE expressions. DC's structure affects DISGUST and SADNESS during listening, regardless of participant characteristics. PLEASANTNESS varies according to DC's structure and the acting voice, as well as AROUSAL, which is also correlated with AX. Results are discussed in light of recent findings in affective neuroscience and neuroaesthetics, suggesting the critical role of poetry and listening in supporting human emotional processing. © 2023 by the authors.

EXPRESIONES LITERARIAS SOBRE LA PANDEMIA POR COVID-19: IRRUPCIONES DE LA OTREDAD EN "THE WUHAN I KNOW" (LAURA GAO) Y "YOU CLAP FOR ME NOW" (DARREN SMITH)

The crisis uncovered profound changes in human and social interactions, among them, the processes of oppression and segregation towards immigrants and ethnic minorities were accentuated. Based on the relationship between otherness/pandemic, this paper proposes the analysis of two texts: "You Clap for Me Now", a poem by Darren Smith, and "The Wuhan I know", a graphic memoir by Laura Gao. Sin embargo, encontramos antecedentes que analizan este género desde su estatuto como representación social y simbólica de las epidemias. En el mismo sentido, Cynthia Davis (2002), en "Contagion as Metaphor", señala la textura simbólica de la literatura de epidemias: plagas, virus y pestes se enriquecen de significados y se convierten en construcciones textuales metafóricas de un estado de crisis social.

Posthumanist stylistics

I present a posthumanist approach to literary interpretation using stylistic analysis. It is posthumanist since i) digital cameras/audio-video resources and editing applications prompt multimodal readings of literary works unlikely from human intuition alone;ii) anthropocentrism in literary texts is defamiliarised. I highlight how stylistic analysis can be used productively for developing multimodal creativity in posthumanist reading by motivating audio-video edits and effects. I model using Anne Brontë's poem ‘Home' (1846). When read only with intuition, ‘Home' communicates young Brontë's yearning for her family home. In contrast, this article has a non-intuitive digital multimodal realisation of this poem where a young Californian stuck in London because of pandemic (Covid-19) travel restrictions yearns for her home state in the aftermath of wildfires linked to anthropogenic climate change. This posthumanist transformative reading, flagging the negative repercussions of humans for their planetary home, defamiliarises the poem's anthropocentric normality. Importantly, I show how stylistic analysis of ‘Home' motivates creative use of audio-visual edits and effects in the posthumanist multimodal reading. The article makes contrast with standard interpretive practice in stylistics (‘humanist stylistics'). It also reflects on the value of posthumanist stylistics for extending students' creative thinking in an educational context. © The Author(s) 2023.

Poetic discourse analysis: The roles of education in prison abolishment and futures of public health and safety

This document engages with discourses surrounding prison abolishment, defund/refund movements, COVID-19, and education as it relates to the Prison-Industrial Complex through a critical, poetic discourse analysis. Through a combination of artistic and analytic considerations, the work seeks to examine how systemic structures are being confronted in our temporal frame, focusing on the discourses of activists, government statements, and media outlets. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

Specters of Minks: Postcapitalist Elegies and Multispecies Solidarities

While narrative approaches in International Relations (IR) have become increasingly prominent, posthumanist narratives of capitalism remain on the margins. Informed by feminist avant-garde poet Susan Howe and philosopher Jacques Derrida, I develop a ‘drift narrative' approach to human-mink relations during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, wherein millions of minks in fur farms were infected by the coronavirus and culled. This approach employs the use of postcapitalist elegies constructed in a wildlife refuge located near a mink factory farm. In a context of global mink culls, the wildlife refuge – where minks live freely – proximate to a local industrial mink fur farm – where minks are caged and killed for profit – became the site of (re)writing IR in drift narrative form. This poetic analysis highlights trans-spatial links of animal capital and employs intermixed elegiac images, sound recordings, and textual fragments to help us become attuned to nonhuman dreams, desires, losses, and futures. Grounding persistence for postcapitalist futures within the dreams of the dead, the drift narrative generates a spectral form of global multispecies solidarity. Contributing to the interspecies and narrative turns in IR, as well as multidisciplinary work on multispecies solidarity, the drift narrative offers an aesthetic and ethical critique of past and future animal capital systems that render more-than-human life as killable. © The Author(s) 2023.

Panel 19, Number 9, East: In Memoriam to Larry Insel

The author on his first trip to Washington, DC, in 1993, squeezed in a day of sightseeing between his meetings and conferences. When the author came upon the Vietnam War Memorial, he was suddenly seized with the urge to find the name of a long-lost high school friend, Larry. This poem came to him as he sat in the Metro train, making his way back to the hotel outside Baltimore. The author scribbled it on the back of an envelope. The Vietnam Era shaped the author's life. Because of the lottery, the author and his friends struggled to find ways to avoid fighting a war they didn't believe in. Larry's decision to join the armed forces early on stood in contrast to the angst and struggles the rest of our close friends experienced. The author's sense of loss during the Vietnam War years echoes today's COVID-19 era tragedy. Then and now, there are so many losses: not just relatives and friends, but also the loss of a unified voice of comfort in the face of profound polarities, the persistent lack of civility in public discourse, and the uncertainty-and at times terror-that we all collectively face. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

Reading the lockdown: Responding to covid poetry

During 2020, sales of books increased as readers found more time to engage with fiction and return to books that provided comfort and a sense of escapism. The Covid-19 pandemic also provided the space for a new genre, "covid fiction", to emerge. This article examines the sub-genre of "covid poetry" by integrating text and reader response data analysis to examine the representation of the pandemic experience in Michele Witthaus' poem "The new shape of fear". Analysis of the data reveals that participants interpret and discuss the poem by drawing on foregrounded language features in the text, reflecting on their own pandemic experiences and demonstrating empathy with the experiences of others. These findings demonstrate that covid poetry may have particular interpretative effects that are geared towards self- and other-understanding. Overall, the article sets out some first steps towards examining the stylistic characteristics and interpretative effects of this emerging and important genre. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)