You are very accurate with this comment. His writing is so beautiful I feel guilty reading it.

Your review stimulated my interest in Nancy Volkman’s Nomina, and I’m gobbling up everything I can find of her sonnets on the Web. One reviewer speaks of her “resolute rejection of closure,” which I think is knee-jerk post-avant pap; her poems slam the barn door pretty firmly, as in the example quoted here.

That’s what a good review does, Joel, points readers to stuff they may like while raising what yellow flags as can. A bad review, and I used to write them many years ago, tears down their guy in favor of our guy.

My take on Volkman is that the sonnets are deliberately aimed to frustrate “close reading.” You’re working to piece out a prose synopsis: she sees this bird, agoraphobic sky, she runs screaming, what was that latin? and while you’re puzzling, hypnotized by glittering rhyme, she slips you the mickey hiding in poet’s mind, which grants her the leap to the final line.

Dylan Thomas said much the same thing about his poems working on the ereader on another level while the mind is laboring to understand.

I’ll be on vacation for two weeks and checking Harriet only sporadically. Be good y’all. May you find the poems, may the poems find you.

It ain’t Old Possum.

Is it?

http://www.b3tards.com/u/420c52b7900bd7084f02/fluffdisast_cctv_store_cat.gif

Erasmus? Me?