poem

GRATITUDE
NO. 05

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Miracles
by Walt Whitman

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poem

HOPE
NO. 04

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“Hope” Is the Thing with Feathers
by Emily Dickinson

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poem

STOICISM
NO. 03

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If—
by Rudyard Kipling

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poem

COURAGE
NO. 02

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Invictus
by William Ernest Henley

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poem

FAILURE
NO. 01

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Defeat
by Kahlil Gibran

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The Body as Archive: Resistance, Reclamation, and the Aesthetics of Embodied Selfhood in Angelou, Rich, Clifton, and Neumann

Jana Neumann, Sit With Me, 2026. Acrylic on canvas, 140 × 110 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

The question of how marginalised bodies constitute themselves as sites of political and aesthetic agency has occupied feminist criticism since at least the early 1970s, yet its urgency has not diminished with the passage of decades. This essay argues that three poems, Maya Angelou’s “Still I Rise,” Adrienne Rich’s “Power,” and Lucille Clifton’s “homage to my hips,” alongside Jana Neumann’s acrylic painting “Sit With Me,” collectively articulate what might be termed a poetics of embodied resistance: a shared insistence that the body, particularly the Black or otherwise marginalised female body, is not merely a surface upon which history inscribes its violences but an archive, an instrument, and ultimately a form of counter-authority. These works do not simply describe resilience; they enact it through the formal and material choices that constitute them as art. Read together, they reveal a cross-generic, cross-temporal conversation about what it means to inhabit a body that the dominant culture has sought to render either invisible or spectacular, and about the aesthetic strategies through which such bodies reclaim the terms of their own representation.

Maya Angelou published “Still I Rise” in her 1978 collection And Still I Rise, a volume whose very title announces the iterative, durational character of its defiance.¹ The poem is not a single act of uprising but a grammar of recurrence: the verb “rise” appears, in various inflections, throughout the poem’s final stanzas with the insistence of a liturgical refrain. Angelou’s formal choices are rarely acknowledged with the critical precision they deserve. The poem’s alternating long and short lines, its deployment of rhetorical questions addressed directly to an unnamed adversary, and its strategic invocation of slavery’s material history situate the speaker within what Joanne Braxton has identified as the outraged mother tradition of African American women’s poetry, a lineage that transforms private grievance into communal declaration.² The penultimate stanza’s sudden expansion into the first-person plural performs this movement from lyric self to collective embodiment with extraordinary compression. Angelou does not transcend history; she carries it upward with her. The poem’s confidence is not naïve triumphalism but what bell hooks, writing on Black women’s self-recovery, describes as “the will to choose joy in the face of a hostile world” understood as an explicitly political act rather than a personal disposition.³ The body in “Still I Rise” is characterised by its physicality, its sassiness, its laughter, its hips that swing and its gold in the air, and this insistence on sensory, kinetic presence constitutes a direct refusal of the desexualised or dehumanised representations that anti-Black culture has historically enforced.

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Perception, Attention, and Altered Sight in Oliver, Blake, Huxley, and Höller

Mary Oliver, William Blake, and Aldous Huxley occupy distinct positions in the literary tradition, yet each arrives at a shared conviction: that ordinary perception is both the instrument and the obstacle of genuine understanding. Oliver’s “The Summer Day” (1990), collected in House of Light, belongs to a body of work grounded in the American Transcendentalist inheritance, though Oliver recasts Emersonian attention as something deliberately unheroic, rooted in the minute and the perishable.¹ The poem’s famous close, interrogating what the speaker intends to do with her “one wild and precious life,” is preceded by something more quietly radical: an account of watching a grasshopper clean her face, rendered with such scrupulous patience that perception itself becomes the subject rather than the means. Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence,” composed circa 1803 though not published until 1863, opens from an entirely different metaphysical position, one inflected by Neoplatonism and the dissenting visionary tradition.² Its opening quatrain, with its demand “to see a world in a grain of sand, and a heaven in a wild flower,” proposes not attentiveness to the empirical world but its complete transfiguration. Where Oliver narrows the field of vision, Blake insists that to perceive truly is to perceive through the particular into the infinite. Between these two poles, Huxley’s The Doors of Perception (1954) operates as a pharmacological experiment in epistemology.³ Huxley’s account of his mescaline experience is, at its core, a philosophical argument: that the human nervous system functions as a reducing valve, filtering out far more of reality than it admits, and that certain chemical agents dissolve that filter. The title’s debt to Blake is explicit and deliberate, lifting its phrase from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite.”⁴

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