First Hard Frost
I covered the last of the basil & peppers with a tarp last night, then brought them in this morning. The weather was clear this morning, with a mist over the river that burned off early & we had a couple of hours of sunshine before the clouds moved in. Raining now, temperature in the [...]
Congratulations to President Gore
If only. Instead:
Even before Mr. Gore won an Emmy for his so-called “user generated” cable television network, Current, or an Oscar for his film on climate change, “An Inconvenient Truth,” he was growing in stature for another reason: his early opposition to the Iraq war.
He had initially voiced it in 2002 in an address that [...]
Pattern
I tell my poetry-writing students that art is about pattern. That human beings are pattern-making & pattern-recognizing animals. That playing with patterns is what we do. It turns out that we have been making patterns for a long time. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could hear the songs that were sung when that wall [...]
C.K. Williams on Emily Dickinson
One of the functions of criticism is to let us read familiar poems with new eyes / ears. I was reading C.K. Williams’ essay, “Poetry and Consciousness” yesterday for the paper I’m working on and was deeply affected by his treatment of this Emily Dickinson poem:
I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
And Mourners to [...]
Reading for Pleasure
Note: I began this post back in May, but just looked at it again in the context of the paper I’m writing on teaching Intro to Lit. I’ve added the second paragraph, which is mostly John Dewey, to the first, written earlier.
Timothy Burke taught a course called The History of Reading last semester & has [...]
Writing a Paper
I haven’t written a conference paper in a long time. After I was promoted to full prof in 2003 I made a conscious decision to cut back on conferences, though in truth (with the exception of several years of AWP) I’d never been a big conference-goer. The MLA meeting always gave me the creeps. Too [...]
Enforcement & Compliance
The hard right has a seamless system in place for enforcing compliance. Are you a working class family that dares speak out about the lack of health insurance? You will be slimed & harassed. Are you an Iraq veteran who dares disagree with the War Party? You will be called a “phony soldier” & compared [...]
Can’t Say that I’m Surprised, Redux: Christianist Creeps
Apparently there are a few problems down at Oral Roberts University. (I always want to put university in scare quotes when I type that phrase.) Look, as I said before, I grew up among these corrupt bastards. I’m surprised that anyone is surprised.
John Latta on Louise Bogan on Shifting Poetic Style, Or: My Poetic Lineage (II)
Latta is always worth reading, but the post that begins with this pair of paragraphs puts a whole run of literary history into high relief:
Odd to think that Stephen Crane’d be a mere four years older than Robert Frost. That spare pre-imagist verse—Crane call’d himself an “impressionist”—of Black Riders publish’d at age twenty-four. Louise Bogan—in [...]
Can’t Say that I’m Surprised
I grew up among these people, after all. The hypocrisy of the Christianist Right knows no bounds. I be Halo doesn’t have much sex in it, though. Sex makes these guys really nervous.
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