Tag Archives: reading

Pronoun Rebellion (1)

Posted on January 22, 2022 by JMN

It’s apparent that contributors to Poetry magazine compose their own biographical snapshots, which allows for a gamut of voicings and modes of self-assertion. A grammar nerd notices how these established and establishing technicians of the word mold language to their … Continue reading →

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A Confounding Clarity

Posted on January 16, 2022 by JMN

Proliferation of phrases: — A turn of speech makes my point vividly — I’ll use it. But this other phrase is pungent — I’ll use it too. Yet another is incisive; and one is innovative; and one wry; this one … Continue reading →

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Broken, Dejected Reader of Poems

Posted on January 15, 2022 by JMN

<p. 137> “World Breaking Apart” by Louise Glück (“Poems 1962-2012,” 2012) I don’t care if this post is preposterously long. It’s a barbaric yawp anyway. My original title for a comment about “World Breaking Apart” was “Inconclusive Antecedence.” It was … Continue reading →

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‘The Past Stretched Before Us’

Posted on January 2, 2022 by JMN

I encountered the following expression in my Arabic reference grammar: May you be ransomed by my soul! Arabic can be sublimely terse and florid in the same breath. Blachere’s example shows optative use of the perfect tense instancing how the … Continue reading →

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The Struggle to Lose Control

Posted on January 1, 2022 by JMN

To All a Good New Year! Audrey Petty describes her first one-on-one conference with her poetry teacher Agha Shahid Ali at the University of Massachusetts. After she read her draft to him, he reviewed it and said, “What if you … Continue reading →

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The Moons of Poesis

Posted on December 25, 2021 by JMN

When reading poetry I try to think like astronomers. They are a doughty lot, trucking with the unexpected, stalking questions that defy asking. “What I really hope for is something we don’t expect” [John Mather, Goddard Space Flight Center, on … Continue reading →

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Poetic Researches

Posted on November 14, 2021 by JMN

Is the soul our dark matter — pervasive but undetectable by any instrument we possess? If there’s a part of me that isn’t glia, neurons, and enzymes, it has found a modicum of rest in the revelation that John Ashbery’s … Continue reading →

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‘Cry of Pain’

Posted on April 15, 2021 by JMN

Housman’s “To an Athlete Dying Young” ruefully ironizes over a lad clever enough to “slip betimes away / From fields where glory does not stay.” Novelists, though, get more mileage out of superannuated jocks — Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom, Malamud’s Roy … Continue reading →

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Virago

Posted on December 21, 2020 by JMN

A correspondent said she was reading a “virago book.” I said. “Is it by, or about, one?” It turns out Virago is a distinguished publishing house. As if on cue, this informative review of Lennie Goodings’s memoir appears. Virago started … Continue reading →

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‘Kate Is There in the Shadows’

Posted on November 17, 2020 by JMN

Here is narrative from a 1960 American novel. A character ascends a staircase to the mezzanine of a house to join another person there: There comes to me in the ascent a brief annunciatory syllable in the throat stopped in … Continue reading →

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