Of Elsewhere
The last time I blogged about outsider art, author and blogger Maranda Russell introduced herself as an outsider artist. Since then, I’ve come to enjoy her WordPress and Instagram, where she posts visual art, poetry, and stories from her life. Since I just brought out my own book of poetry and self-taught visual art, I […]
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 […]
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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
I enjoyed the class on allegory (traditionally defined as extended metaphor) I took in college, and I’ve thought about allegory directly and indirectly for awhile (I also want to write an allegory–not just as in “a book that has definite themes that form a sustained second layer of meaning” but as in “a book in […]
My mom was a volunteer docent at a contemporary art museum when I was growing up, which meant I was exposed early and often to a lot of interesting art, including at least one exhibit of outsider art that really, really grabbed me. Since then, I’ve been strongly attracted to outsider art, both the strange, […]
I enjoy reading the odd book about creativity, art, and writing—the more inspirational and romantic (as opposed to inclined to reduce everything to craft) the better. I’ve been curious about Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way for a long time, so I checked it out from a local library, and I’ve now read all but the appendix. […]
Of Elsewhere 