Language and the Truth
I’m sort of old-fashioned in that I tell my creative writing students that they have a responsibility to the truth of their own experience and that the way they use language reveals the extent to which they have taken that responsibility seriously. Listening to Sarah Palin reminds me of nothing so much as listening to [...]
How to Read a Poem*
Instructions: Begin, in so far as it’s possible, without preconceptions and do not rush to make a judgment about whether you like or dislike a poem, or whether it’s good or bad; most of all, do not dismiss mysteries or difficulties as weird or incomprehensible (at least) until you have worked through the steps below. [...]
Sarah Palin & Censorship
Perhaps the list I posted below is a hoax, but as I said in my correction, Palin’s ideology is just fine with banning books. I grew up among Palin’s people, I know them. They are intolerant, aggrived, and deeply anti-intellectual. And homophobic. Now it appers that, while the particular list may have been made up, [...]
Students’ Reading
When my students read a poem or story, they invariably create suppositions about the characters / plot to flatten out ambiguities. They are very uncomfortable with ambiguities. I was using the Lucinda Williams song “Changed the Locks” yesterday in creative writing to demonstrate parallel syntax & repetition. (I’ll get to Whitman, traditionalists need not hyperventilate.) [...]
Playing with Modernism
If Modernism begins with the death of God & the subsequent plunge into subjective experience in Western culture, it remains true that old traditions keep turning up in new forms. Whereas Modernism dismisses folk beliefs for an urban cosmopolitanism, it has never managed to completely banish the old atavisms of the folk. And good thing, [...]
Theodore Solotaroff
I was really too young to have been influenced by the New American Review during the main part of its run, but I remember in the mid-seventies picking up copies in used bookstores & feeling nostalgic for a scene I was never a part of. Ted Solotaroff is dead at 80. Those beat-up paperbacks, for [...]
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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