Lloyd Wallace on Altman, Cain, & McSweeney
"The poem as a thing to be tolerated, an uninvited presence, like a crick in the neck, maybe, or a song stuck in one’s head, or an interloper one must invite into one’s home and feed until they’ve had their full. It’s tough not to be reminded of Baucis and Philemon, the old married couple who, after inviting disguised-as-a-beggar Zeus into their home, were rewarded for their hospitality by being transformed at death into a pair of intertwining laurel trees, and thus given a future without apartness. A death that grew into a life."
via WEST BRANCH |
|
|
What Sparks Poetry:
Ian U Lockaby on Edward Salem's "Fullness"
"In Edward Salem’s poem “Fullness,” thought is derailed, not from the first instant but nearly, and in each subsequent instant the poem expands and contracts simultaneously in a dissent against time and space, as it leads us to a divine, non-existent anal inner mountain, where there is nothing (and everything) to be seen (at once). Operating intertextually with a Godhead in its poetics of negation, the poem manages, paradoxically, to build possibility through its persistent negations. Each time a line of argument becomes discernable, it’s quickly and forcefully wrought back around its own tail, creating coils of energy in refusal." |
|
|
|
|
|
|
