Of Elsewhere
As my first book of the year, I read Elaine Scarry’s On Beauty and Being Just. I am very glad I read it and I liked it a lot — though, as Scarry says about beauty itself, I find it thought-provoking rather than (simply) true; and the beauty Scarry works to embody and describe is […]
Hello! With all apologies for my continued absence (I’ve been hard at work on my projects….), I am back, I hope, for real, though promises are dangerous. First, a brief update: last year, after my poetry class, I undertook an ambitious summer plan that worked tolerably well, and finally worked a lot on Evernost, which […]
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 […]
In high school I made several false starts on a short story tentatively titled “Water, Water.” The longest version told the story of a dystopian United States plagued by water shortages and censorship—which began to experience floods that only some could see, accompanied by mythological visions and passionate longing. This flood, though it seemed destructive […]
I’ve decided that my “something borrowed”-week can be something borrowed from a non-poetry genre as well as something borrowed from a friend. This takes the pressure off my friends, and also allows me a bit of non-poetry blogging, though this week there is a connection of a sort. I’ve blogged a fair bit about Christian […]
Last fall I submitted to the Rattle Chapbook Prize—one great feature of which is that the entrance fee pays for a subscription, and this includes the chapbooks Rattle chooses to publish. As a result…these chapbooks will be some of my guinea pigs for this poetry review project. The first chapbook I’m reading and discussing is […]
So, I’ve already broken my promise a little—but perhaps only a little. I don’t have deep close reading in this entry. What I’m offering instead is some observations on my responses to Night the First of The Four Zoas (outlined in more detail here). Those who read my last blog posts on Blake will notice Blake’s […]
TL;DR A being who is part of William Blake and all people, Tharmas, takes in the wives/significant others and creations of other self-components. Tharmas’s own wife/SO Enion becomes jealous and kills them (at least, so we’re told later). Tharmas disintegrates and Enion tried to weave a covering for her sins, but a part of Tharmas […]
This is the first blog post in my poetry series. Here is how (in theory) I imagine this series working: each entry will deal with a longer work (chapbook or long poem) by a single poet. In it, I will engage in both general description of everything I’ve read and close reading of some part […]
I mentioned once that I found Northrop Frye more comprehensible than Angus Fletcher, the author of Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode, a bizarre and much-lauded book that drove me up the wall. This was true for Frye’s books The Anatomy of Criticism and Fearful Symmetry. I am not sure it is true for The Double […]
Of Elsewhere 