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"The great pleasure of this book is the writing itself. Not only is it free of academic and ‘lit-crit' jargon, it is lively prose, often deliciously witty or humorous, and utterly contemporary. Poetry's Afterlife has terrific classroom potential, from elementary school teachers seeking to inspire creativity in their students, to graduate students in MFA programs, to working poets who struggle with the aesthetic dilemmas Stein elucidates, and to teachers of poetry on any level." --- Beckian Fritz Goldberg, Arizona State University "Kevin Stein is the most astute poet-critic of his generation, and this is a crucial book, confronting the most vexing issues which poetry faces in a new century." ---David Wojahn, Virginia Commonwealth University At a time when most commentators fixate on American poetry's supposed "death," Kevin Stein's Poetry's Afterlife instead proposes the vitality of its aesthetic hereafter. The essays of Poetry's Afterlife blend memoir, scholarship, and personal essay to survey the current poetry scene, trace how we arrived here, and suggest where poetry is headed in our increasingly digital culture. The result is a book both fetchingly insightful and accessible. Poetry's spirited afterlife has come despite, or perhaps because of, two decades of commentary diagnosing American poetry as moribund if not already deceased. With his 2003 appointment as Illinois Poet Laureate and his forays into public libraries and schools, Stein has discovered that poetry has not given up its literary ghost. For a fated art supposedly pushing up aesthetic daisies, poetry these days is up and about in the streets, schools, and universities, and online in new and compelling digital forms. It flourishes among the people in a lively if curious underground existence largely overlooked by national media. It's this second life, or better, Poetry's Afterlife, that his book examines and celebrates. Kevin Stein is Caterpillar Professor of English and Director of the Creative Writing Program at Bradley University and has served as Illinois Poet Laureate since 2003, having assumed the position formerly held by Gwendolyn Brooks and Carl Sandburg. He is the author of numerous books of poetry and criticism. digitalculturebooksis an imprint of the University of Michigan Press and the Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan Library dedicated to publishing innovative and accessible work exploring new media and their impact on society, culture, and scholarly communication. Visit the website at www.digitalculture.org.

Poetry today enjoys a spirited afterlife. Its aesthetic hereafter has come despite, or perhaps because of, two decades of commentary diagnosing American poetry as gravely moribund if not already deceased.! A little over twenty years ago Joseph Epstein's provocative "Who Killed Poetry?" ignited torch-waving debate between opposing camps of the tweed sport coat and the black beret. Three years later Dana Gioia's "Can Poetry Matter?" and Jonathan Holden's sensible The Fate of American Poetry arrived on the scene, both proposing cures for what allegedly ailed our poetry. Even Donald Hall's impassioned defense of the art invoked funereal lingo, exasperatedly calling for "Death to the Death of Poetry." As a writer, I've literally grown up with the notion that poetry was knocking on death's door-or was it, it la Bob Dylan, knock, knock, knocking on heaven's door? And all my teachers and most literary journals saw fit to remind me that I, as practitioner of said art, was bloodying my knuckles. Practicing a dead art was regarded as a literary badge of honorable dishonor. That poetry was unmarketable and maligned made it paradoxically the purest of art forms. Our small poetry circle, and the university culture into which it had retreated, elevated this isolation as redemptive not destructive of the art. My sense of poetry's near-certain passing was challenged in unexpected ways following my appointment as Illinois poet laureate in 2003. In short, I found myself sweetly flummoxed by the widespread public interest in poetry I encountered around the state. What fascinated me was the disparity between the profession's notion of poetry's mortality and the spirited reception poetry enjoyed when I presented well over one hundred readings in factories, nursing homes, churches, urban parks, and rural public libraries. Each foray I made into alternative means of promoting poetry was met with energetic approval. Goodly numbers of students, teachers, and the general public, for instance, visited Web sites I'd created to feature audio and video x / PREFACE contributions to the contemporary world opened avenues of investigation I'd not have chanced upon otherwise. Other sources of useful prodding have been Bradley University's poetry writing and literature students, whose curiosity and elan fueled my own inquiries. Thanks are due as well to numerous Illinois grade, middle, and high school students for offering the gift of their poems for my discussions. Some essays within this manuscript have appeared previously. Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following editors and publications. "Playing Favorites: American Poetry's Top Ten-ism Fetish" appeared within the pages of Richard Burgin's Boulevard. "The Hammer" appeared originally in Clackamas Literary Review. "These Drafts and Castoffs: Mapping Literary Manuscripts" was chosen for the Kenyon Review by David Lynn, who also selected "Death by Zeroes and Ones: The Fate of Literary 'Papers'" for feature in the inaugural issue of the Web magazine Kenyon Review Online. In addition, "Voice: ...

Motor abnormalities occur in the majority of persons with schizophrenia but are generally neglected in clinical care. Psychiatric diagnostics fail to include quantifiable motor variables and few assessment tools examine full-body movement. We assessed full-body movement during gait of 20 patients and 20 controls with motion capture technology, symptom load (PANSS, BPRS) and Neurological Soft Signs (NSS). In a data-driven analysis, participants’ motion patterns were quantified and compared between groups. Resulting movement markers (MM) were correlated with the clinical assessment. We identified 16 quantifiable MM of schizophrenia. While walking, patients and controls display significant differences in movement patterns related to posture, velocity, regularity of gait as well as sway, flexibility and integration of body parts. Specifically, the adjustment of body sides, limbs and movement direction were affected. The MM remain significant when controlling for medication load. They are systematically related to NSS. Results add assessment tools, analysis methods as well as theory-independent MM to the growing body of research on motor abnormalities in schizophrenia.

Abstract-The humanoid robot iCub is a research platform of the Fondazione Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT), spread among different institutes around the world. In the most recent version of iCub, the robot is equipped with stronger legs and bigger feet, allowing it to perform balancing and walking motions that were not possible with the first generations. Despite the new legs hardware, walking has been rarely performed on the iCub robot. In this work the objective is to implement walking motions on the robot, from which we want to analyze its walking capabilities. We developed software modules based on extensions of classic techniques such as the ZMP based pattern generator and position control to identify which are the characteristics as well as limitations of the robot against different walking tasks in order to give the users a reference of the performance of the robot. Most of the experiments have been performed with HeiCub, a reduced version of iCub without arms and head.