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Category Archives: Metaphor
Ecology of Education
As we advance in the Anthropocene… The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts. C.S. Lewis The Abolition of Man: Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English in … Continue reading →
Paillette
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Kessler Lecture published in Queer Ideas Last week Mary described me to myself as “scattering sequins over us all” — all the people I love. She’s right, she and they do seem so glamorous and numinous to … Continue reading →
My Body Is Like A Home
Alice Burdick Holler “Body house” [after extending an analogy between ears and eyes as windows and mouth as door, this ends the poem] Her body is a house, and she’s home for now. And with the end of the poem … Continue reading →
Paleontologist Stung
Robert Graves On English Poetry (1922) Appendix: — The Dangers of Definition […] let the Dictionary be a hive of living things and not a museum of minutely ticketed fossils. And this bon mot like a bee caught in amber … Continue reading →
Scatological Logic
This twists like the turns of an intestine. Koestler is quoting a character from one of his novels and is doing this in the context of a response to a lecture he just heard. If I may quote from a … Continue reading →
Bone Perches
pulls at the gut and pokes at the brain I came to the poetry of Kristin Chang via the appearance of “Letter From My Grandmother in Tsingtao” in Poetry Daily which republished the piece from Adroit Journal Issue 26. http://www.theadroitjournal.org/issue-twenty-six-kristin-chang … Continue reading →
Dogs in Homer
Priam to Hector in Lisa Jarnot’s translation from Book XXII of The Iliad: And then for me last of all that at my door the hungry dogs will feast upon my flesh, that someone with a heave of gleaming bronze … Continue reading →
Erratics
“Odd Blocks” — it’s the opening poem to Kay Ryan’s The Best of It: New and Selected Poems. […] glacier-scattered thousand-ton monuments to randomness become fixed points in finding home. […] And why not also in the self, the odd … Continue reading →
Recouping the Aleatory
It is a challenge to decide which quotation to put first. Here they are in chronological order. Suggesting perhaps some filiation. A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, … Continue reading →
Libraries of Tears
Time passes. Pain does not. And upon rapid reading, book with tear is stained. Accept, thou shrine of my dead saint, Instead of dirges this complaint; And for sweet flowers to crown thy hearse, Receive a strew of weeping verse … Continue reading →