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Afterword

An Untuning

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 December 2023

Yosefa Raz
Affiliation:
University of Haifa, Israel
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Summary

What does prophetic poetry look like now, in the first decades of the twenty-first century, and what could it become? The poets of this Afterword – Rob Halpern, Hezy Leskly, Anne Carson, and M. NourbeSe Philip – take up the countertradition of “weak prophecy” in various ways. They turn toward what is weak and ungainly, torn, stuttering, glitchy, and leaky, in order to “untune” (as Halpern calls it) national melodies, to reach into the “stinking, eviscerated innards” (Philip) of the language of oppression, to suggest a new way of organizing what is inside and outside, “another human essence than self” (Carson). Their prophetic untuning does not represent (only) a lack or a loss; it is not merely the expression of the poverty, violence, and suffering of the contemporary moment. By marking this poetry as “prophetic,” we can say that it means, through its very weakness, to use a dialectic gaze to actively redeem the past together with the future.

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Chapter
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The Poetics of Prophecy
Modern Afterlives of a Biblical Tradition
, pp. 174 - 191
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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  • Afterword
  • Yosefa Raz, University of Haifa, Israel
  • Book: The Poetics of Prophecy
  • Online publication: 14 December 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009366311.007
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  • Afterword
  • Yosefa Raz, University of Haifa, Israel
  • Book: The Poetics of Prophecy
  • Online publication: 14 December 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009366311.007
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Afterword
  • Yosefa Raz, University of Haifa, Israel
  • Book: The Poetics of Prophecy
  • Online publication: 14 December 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009366311.007
Available formats
×