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Poetry and the Language of Oppression: Essays on Politics and Poetics

Carmen Bugan (Goodreads Author)

really liked it 4.00 · Rating details · 2 ratings · 1 review

A first-hand account of the creative process that engages with the language of oppression and with politics in our time.

How does the poet become attuned to the language of the world's upheaval? How does one talk insightfully about suffering, without creating more of it? What is freedom in language and how does the poet who has endured political oppression write himself or ...more

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Hardcover, 224 pages

Published October 1st 2021 by Oxford University Press, USA

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Oct 11, 2021 Kate B rated it it was amazing

The reader is pulled through Carmen Bugan’s thought-provoking work because it proved at every turn to be brimming - not just with ideas, but with the sensitivity of a true poet and the wisdom of a person who has lived through trauma and who has used that experience to grow deeper rather than bitter, to be dignified rather than craven. She points out that language can be used by oppressive regimes to enforce victimization, but it can also be used by victims to write their way to freedom. Bugan do The reader is pulled through Carmen Bugan’s thought-provoking work because it proved at every turn to be brimming - not just with ideas, but with the sensitivity of a true poet and the wisdom of a person who has lived through trauma and who has used that experience to grow deeper rather than bitter, to be dignified rather than craven. She points out that language can be used by oppressive regimes to enforce victimization, but it can also be used by victims to write their way to freedom. Bugan does all this while writing in English rather than in her native tongue.

A scholar without pretension, Bugan considers her youth and the life of her family under Ceausescu rule in Romania in light of the larger perspective of language and literature. She and her family were somehow able to retain human dignity during the trauma of oppressive communist rule and now she elevates her writing beyond personal suffering to say that “literature makes it possible to preserve our individual experiences in our shared memory”. Bugan makes the case that “the task of poetry is not merely to be expressive, but to avoid being politically partisan.” When she describes the government transcripts of the secret police surveillance that the communist government in Romania kept on her family, she notes “how political dogmas can reach into the deepest parts of a person’s life”. And yet - what appeals to this reader is Bugan’s thoughtfully considered choice to write with artistic aim rather than trying to make easy political points or grasp for a reader’s sympathy.

Though Bugan has lived through the ordeals of oppression, she has made the choice to “write herself free”. One is struck by the strength of Bugan and her family, that they lived through such powerful kinds of intimidation and still managed to make courageous decisions. As a young girl, Bugan wrote poetry as a way to deal with pain but also as a way to express herself while staying silent from the surveillance microphones placed throughout their house. Imagine.

Today, we in Western society who are under a different - and often fully-invited technological (“hey Siri”/“hey Facebook”) and governmental (“hey NSA)” surveillance, may perhaps consider digging our own typewriters up from where they are buried so as to get to the task of writing that Bugan so eloquently argues for in her book: Poetry and the Language of Oppression. ...more

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About Carmen Bugan

Carmen Bugan

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Dr. Carmen Bugan, a George Orwell Prize Fellow, is a prize-winning writer based in Long Island, NY. She was born in Romania and has lived in England, Ireland, and France. Educated at the University of Michigan and Balliol College, Oxford University, UK, with a PhD in English Literature, she is the author of four collections of poems (the most recent one a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation), Dr. Carmen Bugan, a George Orwell Prize Fellow, is a prize-winning writer based in Long Island, NY. She was born in Romania and has lived in England, Ireland, and France. Educated at the University of Michigan and Balliol College, Oxford University, UK, with a PhD in English Literature, she is the author of four collections of poems (the most recent one a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation), an internationally acclaimed memoir, and a highly praised critical study. Her work has been translated into several languages and appears in publications such as PEN Atlas, Modern Poetry in Translation, the TLS, Harvard Review, PN Review, and others. Her book of essays, Poetry and the Language of Oppression, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.
She was a fellow at the Hawthornden International Retreat for Writers (Scotland), a Creative Arts Arts Fellow in Literature at Wolfson College, Oxford University (UK), has received a major individual grant from the Arts Council England, and has taught creative writing and literature in the US, UK, and Switzerland.
Bugan appears at book fairs and festivals such as the London Book Fair, the Cork Literary Festival, The Goteborg Book Fair, and Le Livre sur les Quais (Morges, Switzerland) and lectures widely at universities in Europe and the United States. She is a member of the Geneva Writers Group and of the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers. In 2014 she has presented a long form documentary for the BBC World News and the World Service called ‘The Man Who Went Looking for Freedom’ on the story of her family, which is the subject of much of her writing.
She teaches memoir, creative writing, and provides book doctoring and private tutorials at the Gotham Writers’ Workshop in New York City. Carmen Bugan was the 2018 Helen DeRoy Professor in Honors at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where she lectured on Poetry and the Language of Oppression; she was also the 2018 Dow Visiting Scholar at Saginaw Valley State University, where she gave a keynote lecture on poetry in a time of politics. She chairs a monthly poetry reading series called Literary Excursions, at the Setauket Neighborhood House in East Setauket, NY, a platform she has founded in 2016 to support the local poets. ...more