Graduate Workshop Blog Spring 2018

 Art by Loren Crabbe, from the series “ Purging Abjection .” Here's a video that I always think of when considering the difference in fear responses, and it hits several of the same topics we have this semester (uncanny, masks, and I think in terms of response, creepy and abject are similar)   ----->    Why Are Things Creepy? The avenues of exploration and interpretation in Gro Dahle's A Hundred Thousand Hours  are so plentiful, that for the sake of purely instigating a discussion of this collection with specific regards to our class's most recent conversations, I'll focus on a few larger avenues to get the ball rolling.  Dahle's poems have all the elements that should signal them as confessional- domestic space, shame (sexual), emotive lyrical language, etc. Yet from the opening poem, with the room standing to greet the speaker, we know that there are elements of surrealism and abject, radically diverging from confession. Julia Kristeva, in "App

“The voice that broke the silence of the forest was the voice of Anon.” – Virginia Woolf Which Once Had Been Meadow moves through distillation. In the space of the book, even “anesthesia stiffens the walls.” Nothing is sedated; everything is charged. Woolf’s “breaking” is vital, here; the poems possess a simultaneously eruptive and meditative quality, at once “commanding” and “disorienting.” The space’s image-set—forest, wellspring, meadow, breast, beam, heart, lake—is singular only in its presentation. Each image possesses a transformative property, a profundity of scope, and—somehow, in this vastness—precise delivery. Resisting the confessional,* Jäderlund asserts: “The veil does not conceal me now / The monologue does not conceal me.” Thus, the voice of the book is an impenetrable and electrified persona, one of prophetic (or banal?) vision. As the image-set transforms, exchanges, agitates, one sees Ezra Pound’s “sense of sudden growth,”** and is commanded and disoriented b