Category: Literature
-
From Johnson to Leopold: Dull Certainty to Humble Wonder
This semester my writing students and I have been exploring in a class I’ve called “Representations of Nature.” Part of our task has been to study how writers past and present have represented their relationship with or cultural perspective of nature via essays, poetry, almanacs, and fiction. Along the way we have our own weekly… Read more
-
We Still Read (Medieval Poetry): Gawain’s Failure as Success
Last year I assigned my college composition class to read the medieval Romance poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (“GGK”). I had spent time studying it over the past year, and, with the help of the book Approaches to Teaching Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, I couched the reading of it within the… Read more
-
Night Locks the Birds in the Sky: Review of Bird Ornaments
How many ways can we come to know the body through metaphor? In Angel T. Dionne’s book of poems Bird Ornaments, it can be and become so many things: a “dimensional graph/of genetic variations,” string beans for arms, caterpillars for eyebrows, teeth become adversaries. And usually when we think of metaphors, we imagine them opening… Read more
-
Let’s Behead Ourselves: Living As Symbols, Not Images
As I spend time thinking about language and its imperfections, how it only reveals slivers of truths, not a whole truth, I discover how easily we deceive ourselves into believing we could possibly ever know something wholly. Take self-identity for an example. We define ourselves by our jobs, at least in the U.S., in such… Read more
-
Wisdom from Riddles
Bard by Morgan Llewelyn has a great passage about a society too focused on the material world: The speaker describes two roads to take: “One would develop the forces locked within our minds; the other direction led to the constant refinement of tools and weapons, increasing reliance on matter rather than spirit. In choose the… Read more
-
Bent Wings: The Season of Coming and Going with Tarot: Day 17
Tarot card of the day: Four of Wands I love how Tarot images open the reader to so many different possibilities, sometimes too many. When I pulled the Four of Wands, upright, my first response was: this is not how I feel today (although I will say every day I pull a card for this… Read more
-
Home Behind and World Ahead: Season of Coming and Going with Tarot: Day 9
Card of the day: Eight of Cups What I like most about the eight of cups image is the constellation of a cup in the sky. It’s a ninth cup in the image, though it’s the eight of cups card. The constellation of course holds the symbolism of stars as literal guides by compass; but… Read more
-
The Exeter Book: A Season of Coming and Going with Tarot: Day 5
Advent Tarot Day 5: 3 of Pentacles Reversed Of course it would happen sooner or later: a repeated card. This is the beauty of Tarot: it gives us an opportunity to dwell longer on an image and its story. I want to focus on an Advent lyric from the Exeter Book as it’s about foundations… Read more
-
dark business: A Season of Coming and Going with Tarot: Day 4
Judgment reversed: Day 4 They have risen from the dead. How long have they been dead? Does that matter? No—what matters is the call, the trumpet of renewal has sounded by the lips of the angel Gabriel, the giver of divine messages. It’s their second coming, their chance at new life. This card gets to… Read more
-
Linda Hogan’s poem “Eucalyptus” and Imagining the Self
By losing herself, the speaker in Linda Hogan’s poem finds herself: “and like the tree I can lose myself/layer after layer.” “Eucalyptus,” the first poem in her collection Rounding the Human Corners, though it begins in the present, quickly references the ancient past to draw upon its wisdom (“the others are… Read more