From the category archives:

Aesthetics

A Beautifully Scrambled Egg

by Brooks Lampe October 19, 2010 Aesthetics

In , Mathews lets the loose cohesion of his poems suggest profundities that seem unlikely coming from often mundane subjects. His poems are cohesive because of formal structure and theme, but it is a deliberately incoherent kind of cohesion. The effect is delicate and oblique, and it is growing on me. Mathews likes wandering off [...]

Read More
0 comments Read the full article →

More Construction Notes

by migration_test October 14, 2010 Academia

Just a few things to notice about the site redesign. 1. You can now login and comment with your Twitter, Facebook, Open ID, Yahoo, or many other accounts. In the process of this changeover, the old comments have disappeared. Fear not! They are not lost. We’re just in the process of importing them, and barring [...]

Read More
0 comments Read the full article →

The Inward Soul: Dickinson and St. Theresa of Avila

by Joe Weil October 5, 2010 Aesthetics

There is an inwardness so vast, so total, that it has a true integrity—not the pretentiousness of artistic temper, not the vanity of professional mysticism, not the neurosis of social anxiety disorder, but a forthrightness, an honorable, hourly withdrawal from the world that seems, for lack of a better word—ecstatic. Emily Dickinson’s passes this test [...]

Read More
2 comments Read the full article →

Using the Tools of Postmodernism

by Joe Weil October 2, 2010 Aesthetics

Poem In Which Spring Returns (or French peasants who are really from Cobble Hill) Melissa Sheppard Spring comes or maybe it doesn’t, or I come—a sort of spring, painful shoots sticking out of the ground— a woman of shoots, and each one painful. This is the tulip song I sing to my daughter. I say [...]

Read More
0 comments Read the full article →

“The Invisible Avant-Garde”

by Adam Fitzgerald May 28, 2010 Aesthetics
Read More
0 comments Read the full article →

Excerpt from The Book of Tea: “V. Art Appreciation”

by Micah Towery May 14, 2010 Aesthetics

V. Art Appreciation Have you heard the Taoist tale of the Taming of the Harp? Once in the hoary ages in the Ravine of Lungmen stood a Kiri tree, a veritable king of the forest. It reared its head to talk to the stars; its roots struck deep into the earth, mingling their bronzed coils [...]

Read More
0 comments Read the full article →

100 Chimes at Midnight

by Adam Fitzgerald April 10, 2010 Aesthetics

FALSTAFF God save thee, my sweet boy! KING HENRY IV My lord chief-justice, speak to that vain man. LORD CHIEF-JUSTICE Have you your wits? know you what ’tis to speak? FALSTAFF My king! my Jove! I speak to thee, my heart! KING HENRY IV I know thee not, old man: fall to thy prayers; How [...]

Read More
1 comments Read the full article →

Reciting your own poems from memory is for supernerds, or the worst project of my life

by Ben Fama March 30, 2010 Aesthetics

<> Concerning all the recent discussions about memory, recitation, etc, I thought I would try it in my own way. I should disclose that I never recite my own poems from memory at readings. I think it is corny, weird, it makes me uncomfortable, and frankly, to spend that much time memorizing your own work [...]

Read More
4 comments Read the full article →

The Problem of Style

by Adam Fitzgerald March 27, 2010 Aesthetics
Post image for The Problem of Style

So there’s always this double duty, neither to make the best the enemy of the good, nor to make the good the enemy of the best. Scylla and Charybdis. The reason I admire Johnson and Eliot and Empson so much – the thing that holds them together – is that they all think that doing [...]

Read More
0 comments Read the full article →

Do Movie Critics Matter?

by Micah Towery March 25, 2010 Aesthetics

comments on : Journalistic standards have changed so drastically that, when I took the podium at the film circle’s dinner and quoted Pauline Kael’s 1974 alarm, “Criticism is all that stands between the public and advertising,” the gala’s audience responded with an audible hush—not applause. Over recent years, film journalism has—perhaps unconsciously—been considered a part [...]

Read More
0 comments Read the full article →

THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING, ABRIDGED

by Ben Fama March 24, 2010 Aesthetics

Ben Luzzatto’s THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING, ABRIDGED (UDP, 2010) is one of those rare artifacts that transfers its own actual magic—and it is real magic—until the possessed begins to lift a bit toward the sky. Ugly Duckling Presse has been summed up quite well as “a publishing collective specializing in experimental poetry and new editions [...]

Read More
2 comments Read the full article →

An Annotated ‘Some Enchanted Evening’

by Stuart Krimko March 12, 2010 Aesthetics

I recommend playing all the videos at the same time. Some enchanted evening You may see a stranger, you may see a stranger Across a crowded room And somehow you know, You know even then That somewhere you’ll see her Again and again. Some enchanted evening Someone may be laughin’, You may hear her laughin’ [...]

Read More
0 comments Read the full article →