Answer to either of these questions.  1. Consider the following two quotations, and speculate on how either, or both, relate to Mouré's trans-e-lations of Alberto Caeiro / Fernando Pessoa, exemplifying with literary analysis from  Sheep's Vigil. "What we sometimes sense in the other side of the expected linguistic engineering of literary translating are imaginings of ‘source selves’ and recordings of translators as they write: we have perhaps an uneasy mix of the biographer and autobiographer in literary translation who are not merely replacing one language with another but cannot help trying to inhabit authorial subjectivities as they strive to internalize and preserve the textua...

A child said What is plastic? walking along the beach and fetching it to me with full hands; How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than she.   I guess it has become the flag of human disposition, out of colorful polymers woven.   If the handkerchief of Nature is green, they melt and merge to return to black, The sight of crude oil, Branding the owner’s name on the wings of sea birds, pelicans and gulls, on the slippery slick smooth bellies of dolphins and whales, shifting and sticking as they writhe in the water, penetrating and spilling into the very act of breathing. Branding the owner’s name into the corners, the crevices under a turtle’s shell, so that they may wash ashore, and we may say, whose? referring to the guilt.     Or I guess it is a popsicle stick, or a soda bottle, a mid-afternoon snack, a toothbrush,   Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic, And if hieroglyphics tell simply by existing...

Martyna Rogacka I was Judith all along  My father forced me to kiss him on the lips don't bite don't bite raspberry juice flowing down the tiles.  Panties had to turn red eventually I was never going to be a boy now he has other favorite children. I grew into a beautiful female although  I had thoughts sharp as a razor invisible to the naked eye – you can’t draw conclusions from fat constellations. I tried to pierce big words through their dreamy eyes  “I will lick you here, show me what you like” I am a murmuring brook, silent snake  gliding on the bones I am rumbling of the dead. In the end, in the shade of a poplar,  I gave birth to another woman. Red hands dug us out  fished us out of time before they gnarled. When I tell her bedtime stories  I don’t skip burnt bodies, gray hairs  growing in black fields. I want her to think of herself  as embodiment of impossible love when I sharpen the ax, chop the wood take splinters out of finger...

Nuno Marques, w hom you may explore in his website here , says:  we will read and discuss excerpts of Reilly’s   Styrofoam   as an atmospheric poem.  3 questions before class: what for you is the atmosphere? can you point out aesthetic and the material dimensions of the atmosphere?  - and as Reilly would ask - how to live in the tension between loving plastic and plasticity and knowing its environmental impact? During our discussions we will have in the back of our minds the challenge of how to  do an ecocritique considering the body as a vector of relations between the cultural and environmental dimensions and not as an object were thought is imposed upon. 

Write on any (or more):  1. Consider this poem by the St. Lucian Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott (also in last class's powerpoint), " The Sea is History " (1978) and compare it with Adrienne Rich's "Diving into the Wreck". (1972) from an ecopoetical perspective. 2. Watch the following situation video (2020)  by the poet Claudia Rankine and her partner, the documentary photographer John Lucas. Considering that two of Rankine's poetry collections are subtitled "An American Lyric", do you see rifts and evolutions here in the concept of "lyric" that tie in with V. Jackson's overview in her academic entry for "Lyric"? 3. Explore what Evelyn Reilly's poems "Song of" and "Yet the Wor(l)d can still be very pretty", from the sequence SELF (in Echolocations , 2018) do to the notion of "lyrical I", or other means of relating the I to the world.