Spring Break
Preface
Stephen Pasqualina
Issue date: 6/1/08 Section: Spring 2008
This issue unites a collection of interviews, critical essays, and a book review in their common efforts to consider the study of the humanities as a kind of cognitive method for approaching the world at large and the world within. Personism, Frank O'Hara's poetic methodology, has framed and informed this issue's major themes, which involve the interplay between the personal and public spheres as they relate to and unite art, literature, politics, and history. In his 1959 manifesto, O'Hara explains that
[Personism] does not have to do with personality or intimacy, far from it! But to give you a vague idea, one of its minimal aspects is to address itself to one person (other than the poet himself), thus evoking overtones of love without destroying love's life-giving vulgarity, and sustaining the poet's feelings towards the poem while preventing love from distracting him into feeling about the person.
In practice, this methodology often reads as a process by which political circumstance enters personal dialogue, as O'Hara often themes his poems around political subjects (such as Khrushchev's 1959 visit to the U.S.) while never abandoning that very personal communicability that defines his poetry. Personism's "overtones of love" run throughout this issue, with its unification of literary scholarship and socio-political critique that together forge a personal and public foundation upon which the humanities can be viewed as relevant in a world increasingly defined by globalization.
In the vein of O'Hara's Personism, this preface is addressed to you, Matt, the business executive that likes to ask if I've "read any good books lately."
Interviews
This issue begins with a set of related interviews conducted in January and February, which deal with a range of postcolonial problems including cultural and national identity and individual agency. Bapsi Sidhwa introduces the vital interplay between the personal and public both textually and biographically, as she occupies a unique position as both a writer and former political figure. Her interview is particularly politically relevant following the assassination of the late Benazir Bhutto, whom Sidhwa worked with and criticizes virulently. Her desire to write "truth," as she says, is rooted in Sidhwa's personal interest in a kind of de-marginalization that elevates the writer into a political position-" For writers to ignore politics in third world countries," Sidhwa says, "is to present an inaccurate and untruthful reality"-and in so doing, elevates those often ignored by society into positions where they can and must be heard.
[Personism] does not have to do with personality or intimacy, far from it! But to give you a vague idea, one of its minimal aspects is to address itself to one person (other than the poet himself), thus evoking overtones of love without destroying love's life-giving vulgarity, and sustaining the poet's feelings towards the poem while preventing love from distracting him into feeling about the person.
In practice, this methodology often reads as a process by which political circumstance enters personal dialogue, as O'Hara often themes his poems around political subjects (such as Khrushchev's 1959 visit to the U.S.) while never abandoning that very personal communicability that defines his poetry. Personism's "overtones of love" run throughout this issue, with its unification of literary scholarship and socio-political critique that together forge a personal and public foundation upon which the humanities can be viewed as relevant in a world increasingly defined by globalization.
In the vein of O'Hara's Personism, this preface is addressed to you, Matt, the business executive that likes to ask if I've "read any good books lately."
Interviews
This issue begins with a set of related interviews conducted in January and February, which deal with a range of postcolonial problems including cultural and national identity and individual agency. Bapsi Sidhwa introduces the vital interplay between the personal and public both textually and biographically, as she occupies a unique position as both a writer and former political figure. Her interview is particularly politically relevant following the assassination of the late Benazir Bhutto, whom Sidhwa worked with and criticizes virulently. Her desire to write "truth," as she says, is rooted in Sidhwa's personal interest in a kind of de-marginalization that elevates the writer into a political position-" For writers to ignore politics in third world countries," Sidhwa says, "is to present an inaccurate and untruthful reality"-and in so doing, elevates those often ignored by society into positions where they can and must be heard.
Be the first to comment on this story