Of Elsewhere
If you’ve followed my blog for any length of time, you know I try to engage with poetry off and on. I came to reading and writing poetry much later than prose, so I’m not as good at it, but I keep trying, and last year I wrote poems in January — in January and […]
There are many ways I could start today’s post, but let’s aim for the concrete and immediate: I hope to bring out a book this year (intended release date 7/15, but I’m vacillating: do I need more revision time and fallow time to deepen and strengthen it? will I give into convention and look for […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
My latest attempt to reassess priorities has led me to commit to sticking to two projects for the next month or so: create a pictures-only chapbook/zine (I’ve realized they’re short enough that I should call them zines) associated with the month of June in my Evernostian year and get through CS50x, Harvard’s free online introduction […]
Near the end of Descent into Hell, Hugh Prescott and Adela discuss daydreams. Hugh only barely daydreams, whereas Adela does so often, and her defense of this calls the temptress Lily Sammile to her side. It is worth asking what exactly Lily Sammile is, other than Lilith. Her magical remedies seem to be an exaggerated […]
In the last post, I observed that in a Williams-ian afterlife I might well find myself with “some large messy mess of myself to get through.” Descent into Hell centers around love and reality’s conflict with self-infatuation and illusion. If Sodom is a city of disordered love for others, Williams calls “Gomorrah” as the city […]
C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, the former of whom is quite possibly my favorite author, were part of a Christian writing group at Oxford entitled the Inklings. I am not familiar with all of their work, but I first read Lord of the Rings and Narnia in elementary school, I fell in love with C.S. […]
This is the twelfth and final installment of Duessa, a 12,000-word allegory. The rest can be found here. Thank you for reading and happy New Year! This woman on the other side of the glass must be the one he had thought she was, the one whose body she had taken. Thinking of him, she thought, What […]
Of Elsewhere 