Of Elsewhere
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 […]
Today I have been trying (and mostly but not entirely failing) to rewrite a bit of Evernost. I know the problem (my main character bores me and so does the storyline) and I think I know the solution (write it anyway, trying to make it as smart as I can, because neither is inherently boring […]
Last things first: I am revising Evernost-the-novel (as opposed to Evernost-the-compilation-of-poetry-and-pictures, which will take much longer to mature). This is very exciting and somewhat exhausting. Sometimes to encourage myself along the way writing I’ll pick up a random or near-random book on writing. Today’s was John Gardner’s On Becoming a Novelist. I read his The Art of […]
I finished George MacDonald’s The Wise Woman and Other Stories, in which I read only the Other Stories, because I already know The Wise Woman well and don’t have the bug to reread it right now. I found “Little Daylight” rather lovely and expressive but also a bit slight for my taste. “Cross Purposes” was fun but pretty silly […]
I’ve been too distracted by other projects to want to blog lately. Evernost continues to evolve, with excitement and sometimes drama. For a long time I’ve vaguely wanted to write myself into it as a lying narrator and alter-ego of a major character or two. So I’m trying to write a coherent or semi-coherent account […]
This past two weeks I’ve reread Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer—I read it the first time in a public library, I think in high school—and finished C.S. Lewis’s narrative poems (I’d read Dymer and the Launcelot before but stalled out before The Nameless Isle and The Queen of Drum). A few notes from Letters […]
The grad school bug is waning. This because I remembered viscerally rather than intellectually that Evernost needs all the time I can give it and then some (it is a long, potentially extremely long, poem with bits of prose that are almost prose poetry, and I want to illustrate it copiously, so….), and I want […]
Today I bring tidings of two minor projects I’m working on as a result of the Grad School Bug: reading Elizabeth Ammons’ Brave New Words, a call for optimistic, inclusive, and activist teaching in the humanities, and writing an essay exploring the concepts of truth Diana Wynne Jones develops in four pivotal poems in her […]
Of Elsewhere 