Graduate Workshop Blog Spring 2018

“Everything you say about me is bullshit. Blah-blah-blah,/ the story is you are black.” (31) Within the pink cover, Anaïs Duplan’s Mount Carmel & the Blood of Parnassus is split into the opening essay on black pages with white letters and poetry in black letters dwarfed by the surrounding whiteness. Duality laid upon duality is further complicated by the poems that seem to exist in multiple realities, shifting between past/memory and present/future, playful/punning and pensive/pain. Male first names and figures interject and go, sometimes recurring, but never dwelling or insisting they are truly separate entities. The line of thought melts together and extends beyond what is seen on the page, as if it were a spiral viewed in two dimensions. This lack of concern towards being coherent or consistent, this anti-conformity places us at the verge of understanding and the verge of following, echoing the concern of “I’m not being seen for who I am.” (vi). Unlike the cautiously

I'm not done with my review, so to start things off: here are some questions and ideas to guide your review-writing. Take them up as you will. What is "beheaded", in this book? What, if anything, regrows, stands in for, or renews the lost head(s)? What notions of speakerhood--does such decapitation extend?  Consider  headedness . What structures of the book show up in the linguistic habits of the poems? Which poem or section best evinces the thematic concerns of the whole? Do the parts form such a self-congruent whole? Is there a different and more suitable framework for thinking of their collectivity (arrangement, bouquet, rhizome, network)? What other modes, disciplines, forms intersect on or offscreen? Aditi translated the novel  Prosopopoeia  by Moroccan/Francophone author Farid Tali--excerpts here and here . Do these poems evince a "translational sensibility", and how? Bonne chance, Jean

In this thread, I'd like you to post short reviews (2-5 paragraphs) that you think are good. Please accompany the links with a few sentences on what makes them good. Since I mentioned Zach's short reviews earlier this semester, here's one of Feelings by Lauren Ireland . It does a great job of combining a lot of the kind of close-reading discussions/description we do in class - complete with quotes from teh book - with some larger arguments and contexts. For the same reason, here's Abby Burns' review of Carmen Machado's Her Body and Other Parties . H ere's a slightly longer review (8 paragraphs!) but also a good example, in this case Henk Roussouw reviews Uljana Wolf's Subsisters. I look forward to reading your links - and your reviews! Johannes

By a path that, in its own way, is also negative, the poet comes to the brink of language. And that brink is called silence, blank page. A silence that is like a lake, a smooth and compact surface. Down below, submerged, the words are waiting.                                                                                                                              ----  Octavio Paz  I am particularly intrigued by how  Roffé engages with the quotation by examining the undertones/hidden meanings beneath the surface in her poetry.  In Circle,  the underlying messages beneath “the brink of language” that lurk in the abyss understands itself, and the understanding of itself is concave, directing inward to its depth. In “his” memory, the abyss is a hole, but its complexity is fleshed out via “their” words in “his" retrospection: “an even more heinous passage”, which unravels a vast and ominous space extending beyond the hole. The poem’s sparse lines and the w