Category Archives: Uncategorized

Letters Unreread

Posted on March 28, 2009 by Francois Lachance

Grief is a great force. This anecdote struck me. […] and carefully gathered up all of David’s letters to me. Once I was on the airplane, I methodically put the letters into order according to when they had been written; … Continue reading →

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Tâtonner

Posted on March 27, 2009 by Francois Lachance

When I read this passage from William Matthews’s contribtution to Ecstatic Occasions, Expedient Forms I was put in mind of the French verb “tâtonner” and its cousin “tâter”. Of course the preceding paragraph is written with hindsight, rather than with … Continue reading →

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Tracing Sequences

Posted on March 26, 2009 by Francois Lachance

I know I had not read Steve McCaffrey and/or bp Nichol before I worked on “Sorting and Storing”. The whole chapter is devoted to the premise that “Narrative occurs where there is the reproduction of a sequence.” [T]he human self … Continue reading →

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Tracking Abstracting

Posted on March 25, 2009 by Francois Lachance

I had undoubtedly read Houston A. Baker Jr.’s Workings of the Spirit: The Poetics of Afro-American Women’s Writing before I wrote this Abstraction is good. Clear communication about abstraction better. One is of the life of the mind. The other, … Continue reading →

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Early Ongoing Learning

Posted on March 22, 2009 by Francois Lachance

Adrian Miles put the case eloquently for treating play with due respect. Indeed. For all the rhetoric about student based learning and the rest of it at the end of the day it largely is about providing an environment that … Continue reading →

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Cartographic Epithets

Posted on March 20, 2009 by Francois Lachance

There is a wonderful set of epithets that one encounters in reading an essay by John Koethe (poet and philosopher) found in the collection Poetry at One Remove. Here they are lifted out of context — with a slight misquotation: … Continue reading →

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Arrangements

Posted on March 19, 2009 by Francois Lachance

Brian Fawcett in an essay on Robin Blaser entitled “Robin and Me; The New American Poetry and Us” [Yes that is a semi-colon after “Me”] offers this as one of the things that he learnt I learned that real thinking … Continue reading →

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Ritual

Posted on March 18, 2009 by Francois Lachance

Frye on Frazer. Frye situates art between magic (work) and religion (belief). A ritual, in magic, is done for practical purposes, to make the crops grow, to baffle enemies, to bring rain or sunshine or children. In religion, a ritual … Continue reading →

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Epiphany

Posted on March 13, 2009 by Francois Lachance

Bill T. Jones While Amsterdam had shown me that I didn’t know very much about many things, it did teach me that freedom was worthless without the focus of some passion other than pleasure. I knew that I wanted to … Continue reading →

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Horizontals

Posted on March 12, 2009 by Francois Lachance

It is the title of an opera by Robert Wilson that resounds in my mind as I lay down here a quotation from Aaron Shurin’s “Generation” piece which concludes Unbound: A Book of AIDS. The title: the CIVIL warS: a … Continue reading →

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