So, I've posted the front cover, but I wanted to show you what an awesome job Amy Freels, the designer at Akron did with the cover. I had no idea Andie deRoux's image would wrap around the whole book, and when I opened the image I was quite happy.
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Blurbs are funny things. I'm not comfortable asking people who I don't know, so I basically asked my friends to blurb the book.
Thanks Aimee and Jon.
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Our dog, Jake, who turns 14 this year, is suffering the effects of what looks to be hip dysplasia. On top of that, he's got cataracts and is hard of hearing. Poor guy.
The good thing about his hip dysplasia is that we don't have to walk him in the winter rain, so I guess there are hidden bonuses.
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Taught my first week of classes. I'm trying to add more audio/visual stuff to my presentations but I'm finding that just the setup is taking up more time than I want. I'm also trying to minimize the amount of photocopying my students are doing for workshop. We'll see how it goes. If it doesn't work, I'll revert back to my old photocopying ways.
We talked about T.S. Eliot in my long poem class, just because it's a good starting point in discussions about the long poem--the movement away from an exterior/physical hero/heroine to a hero/heroine? whose conflict is mostly internal. From Eliot, Berryman.
The real challenge is the workshop--how to produce valid/active feedback for individualized long projects. My feeling--I'll need to provide rubrics and other models, for the initial stages. Not thrilled about this, but we'll see.
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And already I've got my book order forms for next quarter. Again I'm teaching ENG 453, which I always teach as a prosody/forms class. I'm teaching ENG 460 again, only this time I don't think I'll teach it as a prose poem class. I think I might teach it as an ekphrastic writing course, depending on who else is teaching ENG 460. Got any ekphrastic texts you can suggest? They can be essay, poetry or fiction, since ENG 460 is a multigenre course.
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I'm at a strange emotional point. A point between books. The impetus to be creative is at a low point, though I also feel I have the urgency to be creative. This is a normal state, I'm certain, but it's still disconcerting.
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Current Spin:
3 days ago
7 comments:
Yay, ekphrasis!
A few books (there are so many I'm undoubtedly forgetting) I've enjoyed as I've become a bit obsessed with ekphrasis the past year or so (note: these are all relatively new or perhaps less than canonized as ekphrastic texts... I figured you already know more about the classics and natural choices (Ashbery, Gunn, Nemerov, Rilke, etc) than I do!):
Books of Poetry
Cole Swenson's Try
Sharon Dolin's Serious Pink
Alison Benis White's Self-Portrait with Crayon
Joshua Poteat's Illustrating the Machine that Makes the World
Books of Essays/History/Etc
James Heffernan's Museum of Words
W.S. Di Piero's Shooting the Works: On Poetry and Pictures
Edward Hirsch, ed Poets on Painters
Awesome, Gary! Thanks!
I'm actually teaching Self-Portrait with Crayon this quarter, so that'd be a good one to revisit.
I might also jump into film, too.
The cover looks terrific! And I don't think any of us are comfortable with the blurb process.
This year I'm giving myself permission to enjoy the lulls and not worry so much about being creative—as long as the lull doesn't drag on and on.
So happy for you about book three, but wanted to cry when I read about Jake.
ODP,
"Picture This" by Leonard Barkan, in _Parnassus_ 30:1&2, is a FINE essay on ekphrastic works. Barkan's comparative lit. crit. is really brilliant.
The cover is GORGEOUS! Front and back.
Linda Bierds selected, Flight, would be great for ekphrastics, especially because her poems use a variety of other art forms for inspiration. Bob Hass has some good poems too (obviously "Heroic Simile" comes to mind as a good film-ekphrasis).
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