The Dead The dead are always looking down on us, they say, while we are putting on our shoes or making a sandwich, they are looking down through the glass bottom boats of heaven as they row themselves slowly through eternity. They watch the tops of our heads moving below on earth, and when…
Tag: Contemporary poetry
Sharon Olds
Today I’m reading Sharon Olds’ Stag’s Leap (2012) Stag’s Leap (2012), include poems that explore the details of Sharon Olds’ divorce from her former husband. The book won the prestigious T.S. Eliot prize earlier this year; in awarding the prize, Carol Ann Duffy, chair of the final judging panel, said: “This was the book of her career. There is a grace…
Intensifying my life
I’m reading Stephen Dobyns book of essays on poetry; Best Words, Best Order (1996/2003). I enjoy it a lot, but there is this view in the first essay called Deception, that I find rather difficult to understand. In a discussion on the difference between the novel and poetry, Dobyns say: So in my poetry I believe…
Hi Plato, look at this!
Still soaked in the world of Anne Carson In ESSAY ON WHAT I THINK ABOUT MOST Carson dicuss the concept of ERROR (which is what she thinks about most) through a poem by the ancient Greek poet Alkman: (…) There are three things I like about Alkman’s poem. (…) The fourth thing I like About…
The Forest and The Trees
Why don’t you make a visit to Genevieve Kaplan’s The Forest and The Trees? Kaplan says: I’ve created this blog to keep an informal record of contemporary (and not so contemporary) found/altered/treated/appropriated books, paying particular attention to artists’ books, found-objects, and contemporary poetry & poetics — the focus of my critical dissertation at USC. Here is…
The unconventional world of Mary Ruefle
Apropos my investigation into form; today I’d like to share this great post from Gwarlingo: Mary Ruefle: I have resisted formal poetry my whole life, but at last found a form I can’t resist. It is like writing with my eyes instead of my hands. Ruefle is one of today’s most admired practitioners of erasure…
Burning cold
Elizabeth Bishop At the Fishhouses (Excerpt) All is silver: the heavy surface of the sea, swelling slowly as if considering spilling over, … Cold dark deep and absolutely clear, element bearable to no mortal, … I have seen it over and over, the same sea, the same, slightly, indifferently swinging above the stones, icily free…
sub rosa 