Tag: poetry
Teeming Links – March 29, 2019
I have to start this edition of Teeming Links with a very special message: Vale and R.I.P., Wilum H. Pugmire, 1951-2019. Wilum died this week after several years of troubled health, and the news hit me hard even though it has been quite some time since I spoke with him.
Teeming Links – September 3, 2013
Image courtesy of Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net To preface today’s offering of recommended and necessary reading, here are passages from a hypnotic meditation on solitude, inner silence, reading, and the literary vocation by Rebecca Solnit, excerpted from her new book The Faraway Nearby: Like many others who turned into writers, I disappeared into books when…
Horror, the muse, and inspired madmen: My full introduction to Joe Pulver’s ‘Portraits of Ruin’
Full text of Matt Cardin’s introduction to PORTRAITS OF RUIN by Joseph S. Pulver, Sr.
Robert Frost as “terrifying poet” of a frozen inner landscape
From The Chronicle of Higher Education, a deeply moving, lovely, and troubling meditation on Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” by literature professor H. William Rice, whose father, a Methodist minister, suffered through a transformative depression when Rice was a child and read Frost (among other things) in order to cope with…
Literature makes you weird. Its gift is the uncanny.
In a previous Teeming Brain post (one that has received a steady inflow of visitors ever since I first published it in 2009), I talked about the magical/alchemical power of language in general and poetic language in particular: [T]here’s a positively magical power in language, particularly in the poetic use of it, since language enables…
The power of a memorized poem
Here are some wise and lovely thoughts on the deep value of memorizing poetry from NYU English professor Catherine Robson, author of Heart Beats: Everyday Life and the Memorized Poem. It may be tempting to lament the passing of an era when one and all were seemingly united by a joint stock of poetic knowledge…
Recommended Reading 25
We have quite a varied assortment of reading this week, including: an article about a brilliant reclamation of an abandoned Wal-Mart building for a wonderful counter-purpose; an analysis of Burning Man’s sociocultural-mythological function; a report on widespread distrust of the United States around the world; a fascinating interview with a psychologist on the nature and…
The muse, morning writing, and the mythic imagination
In A Course in Demonic Creativity I talk at some length about the process of using early-morning writing to establish an open line of communication between yourself and your genius daemon. Here are some valuable further insights and reflections on this practice from poet Dennis P. Slattery, originally published in Spring: A Journal of…
“We will never be out of these woods” – The terrors and pleasures of Robert Frost
We are on a routine journey home; we are on the threshold of the universe, serenity mingling with awe; we are far from civilization and terribly near the ancient fears: separation, insignificance, darkness. (“He will not see me stopping” is one false step from “He will not hear me screaming.”) The boundaries between these conditions,…