Of Elsewhere
Two more books down, though they’re something of a detour from my plan…. I reread Charles Williams’ Descent Into Hell, which I’ve written about here and here, but before that I read Sera Beak’s Red, Hot & Holy, which was a strange and strangely rewarding experience. I’ll write a bit here about the juxtaposition of […]
I haven’t read John Gardner’s fiction, though I have a copy of Grendel now (a ratty, cheap used copy from the bookstore where I work, with this sublimely horrible blurb: “…warm, friendly, compassionate….a kind of Medieval King Kong!”), but I really enjoy his writing advice. This book is no exception. I won’t be able to […]
This 1961 edition of a selection of Dickinson’s poetry was lovely — rewarding — and a lot: 321 pages of plot or argument draw a reader through, while 321 pages of poetry are probably meant to be sampled, not read cover-to-cover over a few weeks. I may have mentioned this before, but, if not, let […]
You may recall I wrote at some length about William Blake’s Four Zoas, so I’ll keep this fairly brief: I just read the whole shebang from start to finish in a few days! I find completing two books in a week, even if one (the Blake) is only 100 pages long, an auspicious beginning to […]
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 […]
First, I enjoyed the poetry workshop a huge amount, and I’ve learned a lot, and, possibly even more important, I was motivated to work very hard on poems with a definite audience in mind: the process of trying to translate what I like to write about into something that other people will like too, the […]
I’m too busy with other projects to finish the Ima Sirius-Kriddek blog post I began, and, thanks to the upcoming poetry class, this may remain the case through May. We’ll see, though. Thanks for any who’ve been reading me and see you this summer!
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 […]
Of Elsewhere 