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I explore the threads of literature woven throughout life.
My blogging draws from my research, my teaching, and my everyday experiences.
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Past Posts
- To Followers: Website Moved
- This Semester’s Mantra: “the reserve force of society”
- Endorsements for Zoopoetics
- The Ecopoetics of a Bowhead Whale
- Inaugural Issue of Merwin Studies
- Poet as Bat: On Echolocation
- Don’t Get Poetry?–Try Climbing It
- Terministic Screens in Children’s Literature; or, How the Rabbit Peed in a Bush—a Reflection on Huck Finn
- Zoopoetics: Another Vision and Revision
- Letter of Support for Neill Public Library
- The Agency of Animals
- Zoopoetics Revisited
- People Who Claim They Don’t “Get” Poetry
- Embrace your Cyborg Self: Zotero & Research Management Systems; or Violá
- Toward a Zoopoetics
- On Haiku
- Migration
- Sequoia National Park & the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest
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Aaron Moe 
Reblogged this on These Anointed Ruins and commented:
An interesting approach to reading poetry. I’m not a climber, but I find the analogy makes sense. It also makes me think of a poem by Robinson Jeffers, “Oh, Lovely Rock”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jI3mtBFfl1M
Another way to get a poem: be an engineer or an architect. In my intro to lit class, which is all non majors, I have been surprised countless times by architects and engineers who see the structural qualities of a poem so much better than I do. It almost seems counter intuitive that an engineer would get a poem so well, but these students have shown me how much overlap there is between engineering, math, and poetry. Would that the rest of the academy could see those overlaps. –Peter
Timing, pauses, and the body moving through the poem: these ideas were helpful just now, listening to W.S. Merwin read his poem “Vixen” (http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/237370), in particular these lines:
“as long as it lasted until something that we were
had ended when you are no longer anything
let me catch sight of you again going over the wall”
In his reading, Merwin inserts a very long pause after the word “ended”, a pause which is not obvious in the unpunctuated line. A lesser poet might have made the pause obvious by breaking the line. Thankfully, Merwin has given us a line whose crux rewards the climber’s effort.
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