Adrienne Rich & Graphs of Experience
In her later work, Adrienne Rich has developed a poetic technique that presents the reader with a graph of experience. By experience, I mean the moment by moment tracings of conscious perception. There must of course be a a process of editing during composition, but the poem presents itself as a graph — the poet [...]
Corrupter of Youth
I’m still in a May Day mood & so thought I’d pass this link along, about Allen Ginsberg in Prague, May 1st 1965. That’s when he was crowned King of the May & the authorities decided that the poet was corrupting the fine socialist youth of the city. [Via the New Poetry email list.]
“For a Coming Extinction” (W.S. Merwin)
For a Coming Extinction
Gray whale
Now that we are sinding you to The End
That great god
Tell him
That we who follow you invented forgiveness
And forgive nothing
I write as though you could understand
And I could say it
One must always pretend something
Among the dying
When you have left the seas nodding on their stalks
Empty of you
Tell him that we were [...]
Spring Birds Again
Came home today after teaching & sat on the deck looking at the river. First really warm day of the year, though there are still patches of snow in the deep hollows in the woods. Just at dusk, the blackbirds & grackles began arriving, perching in the high branches of the maples to catch the [...]
$100,000 Lineation
I saw recently that Tom Sleigh’s new book of poems, Space Walk had won the Kingsley Tufts Award in poetry — the richest prize this side of a MacArthur — so I ordered the book immediately from Amazon, thinking that I too might be able to Make Big Money In Poetry. Actually, it’s an intelligent [...]
Apparently, The European Enlightment . . .
. . . was driven by coffee & cigarettes. But we knew that. Actually, the review makes Daniel Lord Smail’s book about how humans alter their & others’ moods sound fascination even though I’m usually suspicious dismissive of Grand Unified Theories of Civilization.
Diebenkorn
I just discovered Tyler Green’s Modern Art Notes (an Arts Journal blog) & wanted to recommend it to anyone with an interest in contemporary visual arts. I found Green’s blog because I had begun checking out Arts Journal after finding that cultural critic & book reviewer Scott McLemee’s blog Quick Study was hosted there. McLemee, [...]
Tillie Olsen
Tony Christini at A Practical Policy notes there is a new documentary about the American writer Tillie Olsen, by filmmaker Ann Hershey. From the SF Gate story about the film:
In the film, Olsen says she started writing about the lives of the working people she grew up with because “it was nearly impossible to [...]
More on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
Finished my read-through of the novel for next term. I’m going to be using Frankenstein to focus several issues — education, which I mentioned previously, will be central, especially as it contributes to our idea of what makes us human. Oddly, the book has hardly anything to do with science, as such, because Shelley glides [...]
Rereading Frankenstein
I’ve been rereading Frankenstein the last couple of days because I’m going to teach it in my Imagining Science course next term. I’ve taught the book before, but never well, I suspect because I never managed to enter into its imaginative universe until now. The book is a bundle of narrative implausibilities & the science, [...]
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