August 20, 2019
The Struggle Between the Visual and the Verbal in Browning’s “Fra Lippo Lippi” Part Five
This is Part Five of a series. Read parts one, two, three, and four. Ultimately, the brawl between the seen and the said that goes on in the poem causes […]
August 16, 2019
The Struggle Between the Visual and Verbal in Browning’s “Fra Lippo Lippi” Part Four
This is Part Four of a series. Read parts one, two, and three. In one example of this simultaneously spatially and temporally mobile impulse, Lippi depicts a future image of […]
August 13, 2019
The Struggle Between the Visual and Verbal in Browning’s “Fra Lippo Lippi” Part Three
This is the third post in a series. Read parts one and two. We can see Browning leaping back-and-forth in another instance of the poem’s ongoing battle between word and […]
August 7, 2019
The Struggle Between the Visual and Verbal in Browning’s “Fra Lippo Lippi” Part Two
This is Part Two. You can read Part One here. Any marriage of the visual and verbal in poetry contains its share of arguments. This struggle between the painted and […]
July 31, 2019
The Struggle Between the Visual and Verbal in Robert Browning’s “Fra Lippo Lippi”
A paradigmatic ekphrastic poem, such as W.H. Auden’s Musée des Beaux Arts, with its central description of how the everyday life of the painting goes on as usual in Breughel’s […]
September 20, 2017
Film as Poetry’s Modern Sister Art
People often ask me why I think poetry and film go together like peanut butter and jelly, and I say, “Well, it’s kind of like that Videodrome interview,” and they […]
October 3, 2016
Contemporary Ekphrasis
Last week at the Montana Book Festival the poet Michael Earl Craig and I conducted a workshop entitled “Contemporary Ekphrasis,” and for funsies I thought I’d post my “lecture” notes […]
December 12, 2012
The Lessons of Objects: An Interview with Mark Doty
More than anything, Mark Doty seems to me an investigator of objects—of the things and beings that clutter the world, the microcosms inside microcosms inside our macrocosm. In his work […]
November 28, 2012
Reading a Legible Reality: Barthes and the Infinite Text
While perusing the KR blog archives this past week, I came across a great post by Hilary Plum about the Occupy movement, social vicissitudes, and the trouble with the “us” […]
March 25, 2012
Masterpieces in public: on common space and common language
“…Everything that appears in public can be seen and heard by everybody and has the widest possible publicity. For us, appearance—something that is being seen and heard by others as […]
February 22, 2012
Someone Wrote You a Letter
You know you should write but you don’t. I don’t. Let’s be clear: I’ve neglected my blog for weeks now, though I love it. And it took three weeks to […]
January 18, 2012
Mind of Winter
If anyone has one, a mind of winter, it’s Tomas Tranströmer. I’ve been thinking about his poems lately, how each seems to place the reader in a crystalline picture frame […]