Discourse stylistics and poetry: A study of the strategies in a selection of Ushie’s poetry
Keywords:
Cohesion, coherence, presupposition, deictic, dialogic, discourse stylisticsAbstract
Studies in discourse analysis and discourse stylistics, most notably Halliday and Hasan (1976), Carter and Simpson (1989), Olateju 2004) and Yule (2006), have tended to focus disproportionately on data sourced from prose narrative texts possibly because the chief graphological devices of cohesive and coherent discourse such as end punctuation and in-line anaphora, cataphora and deixis are more common in prose narratives. This study takes a different view. It interrogates these assumptions by focusing exclusively on the intra-and inter-textual discourse properties of poetry. Poetry, despite its seeming ‘disjointed’ exterior provides some of the most involved linkages in language. And the poetry of Joe Ushie exemplifies this in a remarkable way. It is not for nothing that Ushie is widely referred to as the people’s poet. Scanning through his poetic oeuvre, this research interrogates the ways in which Ushie’s thematic concerns in selections from Hill Songs (2000), A Reign of Locusts (2004), and Yawns and Belches (2018) are seriated through anaphoric, cataphoric, deictic, dialogic and presuppositional connections. The paper concludes that his poetry, through a complicated interplay of the dialogic, the dramatic, the cohesive, and the coherent discourse strategies, presents a seriated but continuous interaction between the poet and his readers.
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