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Category Archives: Metaphor
Coup de theatre
Towards the beginning of the book, there are two good poems. One turns on the trope of the voyeur observed. “The Book Women” which opens the book begins with a portrait of older women that coming to a reading expose … Continue reading →
It Bears Repeating
From Zbigniew Herbert “Chord” as translated by Alissa Valles and found in The Collected Poems 1956-1998. a good memory cures the scar a loss leaves I’ve no idea about the original Polish. I do like the polysemy offered by the … Continue reading →
Mind and Migration
There is a superb set of lines in Robin Blaser’s great companion poem on Robert Duncan in Pell Mell also collected in The Holy Forest. Blaser references “the travois of the poetic mind / the drag-load harnessed to the body” … Continue reading →
Working It Through
In the concluding pages of The Telling by Ursula K. Le Guin one finds a nice summation of the novel: […] belief is the wound that knowledge heals. And the irony is that reading fiction progresses by a suspension of … Continue reading →
Sublime Selves
Marlene Goldman in Paths of Desire: Images of Exploration and Mapping in Canadian Women’s Writing in a discussion of Jane Urquhart’s The Whirlpool provides us with a concise and incisive explanation of the sublime: According to both authors [Burke and … Continue reading →
Excerpt of an excerpt
Fenollosa p. 22 in Symposium of the Whole: A Range of Discourse Toward an Ethnopoetics edited by J. Rothenberg and D. Rothenberg And though we may string ever so many clauses into a single compound sentence, motion leaks everywhere, like … Continue reading →
Image and Concept
Words by Austin Warren from his book Richard Crashaw: A Study in Baroque Sensibility All imagery is double in its reference, a composite of perception and conception. Of these ingredients, the proportions vary. The metaphorist can collate image with image, … Continue reading →
Accidental: New Roses
Page 415 in the 2000 paperback edition of China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station blooms this piece of typesetting magic which snags my attention like a thorn: “I do not dream, der Grimnebulin. I am a calculating machine that has calculated … Continue reading →
Kompost
At 451 degrees Fahrenheit paper burns. What is the equivalent metaphor for the electronic crash? And so for day 480 06.04.2008
Slub or the Power of Words
The blind protagonist of “Night Vision” in the collection The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits by Emma Donoghue muses on vocabulary building: Since then I’ve been collecting words, you might say. They help me to get up, say, when … Continue reading →