March 15, 2019
Sandra Alcosser, “A Match Flaring up in a Dark Universe”
“Brevity in writing, whether evidenced in a short poem or a series of tankas like Niedecker’s “Paean to Place,” condenses many of writing’s tropes into a few stanzas with enough absence between each stanza for a reader to participate with the writer in a discovery. It is the surprise within the poem that causes readers to lean in for centuries, finding again and again what absence or presence haunts it on the universe of the page.”
“Interview with Sean Hill”“Bishop’s ‘One Art’ made me think about how the act of repetition operates in speech—how it expresses and communicates the human condition. We repeat things that are important, things we want to remember, things we want to convince others and ourselves of, and we sometimes repeat things out of nervousness. Repetition can reflect our emotional state. And the speaker of a poem must be, not necessarily relatable, but a plausible voice / being.”
“Giving Shape to the Shapeless: Prosody and Depression”
“Then all of the ill-sourced pressure was relieved. The poem could now breathe, and in its new-found breathing, it could relax and focus and begin to try to say something about what my mind was enduring and struggling to articulate, is still struggling to articulate. Instead of meters and line breaks, I could shift my attentions to sentence variety, internal rhymes, imagistic clarity and precision, associative thought sometimes to the point of pressing toward the edge of the non-sequitur, and all of these in the name of voice, perhaps even vision.”