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Category Archives: Introductions
Horsing Around
Yoland Villemaire Présentation critique French Kiss: étreinte/exploration by Nicole Brossard Les intrigues se chevauchent et se confondent, les protagonistes frenchkissent au point de disparaître dans l’étreinte. Ça danse tellement que l’armature du récit n’est plus qu’une radiation du sens et … Continue reading
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The Burial of Hunger
In a paragraph referencing culinary history from Apicius on the order of courses, Mario Pei presents a sentence containing and extending a long repeated pattern: Once the arts of civilization are established, it seems normal to open the meal with … Continue reading
Posted in Food Writing, Introductions
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Companionship: Between Wading and Plunging
Molly Peacock Prologue The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2008 She points out a concern to reach and embrace: What I see, from poets from diverse backgrounds, provinces, ages and personal categories, is a unity, a core, something identifiable as … Continue reading
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Poetry After Freud
A. Alvarez Introduction The New Poetry 1962 The introductory essay outlines a set of negative feedbacks operating in British poetry in reaction to the work of T.S. Eliot. This is what it concludes: What poetry needs, in brief, is a … Continue reading
Posted in Dichotomies, Introductions, Poetry
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A Triad of Tricolons
I am a sucker for a tricolon and even more so for a tricolon describing food. The description of the offerings on a market day: On good days—and most days are good—the Provençal sun transforms ripe peppers to fire, honey … Continue reading
Retallack on Waldrop on Stein
Judicious situation of a quotation. What exceeds anything in [Otto] Weininger’s philosophically pretentious, utterly congested “deductive morphologies,” as well as Stein’s own reductive cataloguing, is the way she has begun to conjecture in the act of her writing that, as … Continue reading
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Food in Time
Rooting food in temporality. This is not a manual of cookery but a book about enjoying food. Few of the recipes in it will contribute much to the repertoire of those who like to produced dinner for six in thirty … Continue reading
Posted in Food Writing, Introductions
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Habit & Taste
I like how these opening words draw an analogy between cooking and writing and how that analogy is cemented by the recourse to habit. Cooking is not about just joining the dots, following one recipe slavishly and then moving on … Continue reading
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Story and Self and State
Richard Ronan in the introduction to his collection of poems Narratives from America opens with the observation: A story houses us. Often more utterly than does our flesh. But this is not left at the level of the individual, the … Continue reading
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Meet the Wort Family
Anna Pavord in the preface to the Herbology section of Harry Potter – A History of Magic: The Book of the Exhibition (At the British Library) waxes eloquently on plant names and the very special magic contained in etymology. She … Continue reading