Of Elsewhere
Tomorrow, Dr. Ima Sirius-Kriddek will praise a poem composed just yesterday—she would have been working on this post for the past few hours, but her computer got impossibly slow, and so it’s not ready…. But let the poem itself (generated by this website) serve as a teaser: How happy is the wonderful friend! Does the friend […]
I’d planned to offer you a new “Something Old” today, but I am pleased to announce that I got an email out of the blue from Dr. Ima Sirius-Kriddek, who is, at last, ready to make at least one guest post. Most of you won’t remember Dr. Sirius-Kriddek, Unseen University’s eminent professor of literature, but […]
Today we circle around to Something Blue, a poem I wrote that is unlikely to be published elsewhere. Today’s poem is from my self-published poetry zine Of Elsewhere: An Exoskeleton, and it depicts a shift toward spring. It came out in a rush (albeit with a bit of fun fiddling) a few years ago, and it has no […]
There is no way to know everything. In today’s information-rich society, there is no way even to know everything that is known. My instincts (which are sometimes, I grant you, pessimistic) tell me there is no way even to form an intelligent-sounding opinion about (I would estimate) 90% of the things you have to have some opinion […]
First, I regret to admit that I have not gotten through Tom Bradley’s “chymical illuminations” of Mark Vincenz’s This Wasted Land, the even more hilarious and dextrous footnotes to the hilarious and dextrous post(post-post-post?)modern send-up of Eliot’s The Waste Land. (I started my review here.) I am not sure I have anything too useful to say about […]
I’ve had a busy week—working extra around the holiday to cover for coworkers’ travel, spending time with visiting family, etc.—and I haven’t gotten through my Something New post (the annotations to This Wasted Land). Instead, I’ll share a creepy winter short story. I shall tell you a story now. There is nothing I like so well as […]
The second time through Charles Williams’ masterpiece Taliessin Through Logres, I find that I experience the poems as more difficult than I did the first time, in 2013. This is reassuring, because everyone says they are difficult, and I know that I can sometimes read too lightly to notice even when I’m failing to understand something […]
Today I bring you the next poem in Of Elsewhere: An Exoskeleton. It doesn’t have a title, but it riffs on “gray, the nothing color” from Colorless last month. It depicts the state of mind at the edge between winter and spring; I envision it describing a cold, cloudy, but rainless day. The snow may have melted, […]
Working in the children’s section of a bookstore, I see a lot of adults with children, and I enjoy thinking about the dynamics of parenting and how best to do it. Today, for this cycle’s non-poetry post, I plan to talk about parents who keep a close rein on their children’s reading, which I tend […]
This month’s Something New brings us something really new, new in genre as well as in publication date. Last week I reread The Waste Land in preparation for…This Wasted Land. (I figure the title means both that “this land” is being wasted, as in mis- or under- used, and that “this land” is really, really drunk. […]
Of Elsewhere 