It’s exasperating when people refer to a work of art as “great” as if that were an objective pronouncement. Great for what? The idea that there could be stable, neutral criteria by which literature could be judged more or less worthy is at best… Continue Reading “A Very Good Anti-Best List”
I found a new poetic form this week through Dave Bonta’s always excellent Poetry Blog Digest: the cadralor. JJS quotes a definition in the post “The good, the bad, and the ugly”: “The cadralor is a poem of 5 unrelated, numbered stanzaic images, each… Continue Reading “December cadralor”
Octave and sestet: my ridiculously precarious Zoom setup for delivering a paper at the Sonnets from the American Symposium, and then my home symposium-delivery system. Presenting on short-lined sonnets in a piece called “Partial Visibility,” I edited my messy desk out of the virtual… Continue Reading “Sonnet prompts from #SonnetsfromtheAmerican”
Some troll tweeted at me the other day that since I seem not to like Lexington, Virginia, I should just leave. He styled himself as a lover of the Shire who’s not ashamed of being a hobbit. He even used Elijah Wood as Frodo… Continue Reading ““I live in language on land they left””
Deferred Action Look at the mountain, find my boots, abandon walls, look at the mountain. It’s all I do. The president tweets DACA is dead while the magnolia publishes other news: the future will be pink. Whom should I listen to? Beets for… Continue Reading “Dreaming”
“Let him who is without my poems get assassinated!” Walt Whitman wrote, when the self-published 1855 Leaves of Grass didn’t make much of a splash, despite the three glowing reviews Whitman himself wrote and published anonymously. I’m reading him for a 4-week, all-remote Whitman… Continue Reading “Hope, ambition, and other tricky green things”
We’ve been called so many things that we are not, we startle at the sound of our own names. -Elizabeth Hazen, from “Devices” I’ll be teaching a virtual Whitman and Dickinson course in our May term, and because it may be pass/ fail only,… Continue Reading “Virtual Salon #4 with Elizabeth Hazen”
I’m dormant these days, sometimes “chafing the shell,” as Dickinson wrote, but also conserving energy and trying to stay focused. Some hibernaculum thoughts: I clearly know nothing about words or publishing, because I posted my most popular tweet ever this week and it was… Continue Reading “Still at the Egg-life–”
Actually, that title sounds sexual–sorry. I MEAN to tell you how my year is ending, show off some cool student work, and wish you a happy solstitial impeachment frenzy. My happy news–honored above by a photo of Ursula ecstatic about catnip–is receiving a Katherine… Continue Reading “Not with a whimper but a bang!”
mapping the nest
A selfish poet
I make photographs and poems to please myself (and share them to please you).
pages from an unbound book
a poetry blog & online home to the work of José Angel Araguz
book blogger & reviewer
Poetry, haiku, tanka, and micropoetry
Art. Disability. Writing.
Place, Poems, Practice
Poetry and what-not
(because compost happens)
The work wants to be made
Writing from both sides of the brain
"This work is unlike any other, in its range of rich, conjuring imagery and its dexterity, its smart voice. Carroll-Hackett doesn’t spare us—but doesn’t save us—she draws a blueprint of power and class with her unflinching pivot: matter-of-fact and tender." —Jan Beatty