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Poetic Quanta and the Terrestrial Residue of Gil McElroy
Dull sublunary lovers’ love —Whose soul is sense—cannot admit Of absence, ’cause it doth remove The thing which elemented it. -John Donne The continuous work of Gil McElroy contains poems that are more suggestive of physical matter and processes than some other poems, in the sense they cannot really be defined by any one of…
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Toronto, January 2012: a Poem
For JP Here is a curbed and censored winter— its skies are blank as paper. So instead we read the sidewalks sanded bone-white by a wind made fast and loose on northern highways. They draw chalk lines over crabgrass relapsed since November. “Never mind,” they say, “This is no bardsung city of love, just the…
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Bookishness: Week of January 30, 2012
Mister Lonelyhearts Daniel Handler (aka Lemony Snicket) recently took over the Huffington Post Books twitter feed to dole out relationship advice in support of his latest book, Why We Broke Up. As one might expect, the resulting advice is clever and wry, but it’s also, in many cases, pretty bang on. Example: Q: “How do you go from being just…
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Species Counterpoint: Reverberations of Jenny Sampirisi’s Croak
Reviewed in this Sight-Reading: Croak, by Jenny Sampirisi. Coach House Press, 2011. Why did I introduce into the text all those extraordinary frogs and legs and things, all that fermenting matter, isolating them on the page only by the style, the cold and disciplined tone, and demonstrating to the reader how completely I dominated the…
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TRB Podcast: The Beginnings of Poetry, Virginia Jackson at the University of Toronto
On Friday, October 21, the UC Irvine Chair of Rhetoric and Communication Professor Virginia Jackson spoke at the University of Toronto on “The Beginnings of Poetry.” As the organizers of this fascinating talk said, Professor Jackson is one of the most exciting and innovative people writing about poetry in any field today. Prof. Jackson is…