-
On Baker’s Stone Girl E-Pic
I’ve been struggling—let me admit it—to find a way to write about Ed Baker’s Stone Girl E-Pic. It’s a 515-page poetic adventure, the reading of which is like watching sparks thrown off by a fire: the fire’s below the rim of the firepit, so you can’t see it directly, but the climbing sparks, the waves of light and heat under a skyful of stars—this is the sensation Stone Girl produces.Read More
-
Mastery
Several remarkable items in this morning’s online reading… This interview in Guernica Magazine with the inimitable Arundhati Roy Conrad DiDiodato’s trenchant meditation on certain observations by Donald Hall and their relevance to Canadian poetry and the avant-garde at large Jonathan Mayhew’s comments on writing about María Zambrano (more on this below) A tantalizing report on some scientific progress regarding the Voynich manuscript Among all these wonderful irruptions of insight, the one that made me jump up and ruffle my hair (as Nabokov said certain readers of Invitation to a Beheading would do) was Jonathan Mayhew’s: “I actually like learning more…Read More
-
On the Blognoscenti
Conrad “at home” I’ve recommended Conrad DiDiodato’s Word-Dreamer: poetics blog before, and as if his fine work there weren’t enough, he’s hit upon a fascinating project: the development of a “blogger poetics text,” drawing on blogging by writers he calls “blognoscenti”. (You can read all about the project here. Be sure to read from the bottom up!) Conrad has generously cited this blog as part of his project, but I would be following it anyway because he has an eye for pithy notions whose significance one can spend quite a pleasant while unpacking.Read More
-
Memory Theater(s)
Conrad DiDiodato, erstwhile Perpetual Birder, has issued a call for memory theater photos to be posted by poets with Webs sites or blogs or Facebook pages or even old, pitted-cork bulletin boards. I posted one here a few days back, and Conrad has posted one provided to him by the inimitable Ed Baker.Read More
-
Two Ways of Looking at Stevens’s Blackbird
There’s an interesting discussion (at least I find it interesting) over at The Plumbline School. A poet/academic named Conrad DiDiodato, after a post with a few ripostes, has offered up an example of the sort of reading he practices. He’s chosen to write about the first poem in Wallace Stevens‘s famous sequence “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” I recommend you read his comments before reading mine, which I’ve deposited in the comment stream to his post. I’m pasting my reading of the poem below, some of which won’t make sense unless you read his commentary first.Read More