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Taken radically out of context, Iain Sinclair (from his book about retracing John Clare’s footsteps from Epping Forest back to Northamptonshire, Edge of the Orison): “Vision is also a form of narrative” (p.18). Also, “Punctuation is superfluous when you transcribe the diction of a multitude of dumb things” (p. 21). “Transcribing the diction of a … Read more

Tranströmer also writes, in a fairly early poem, “Restraint, dreams, restraint.” Again, it’s not clear to me whether he is suggesting a circuit—a process, a progression—or simply articulating joints in the poetic body. But I do like this, much more than the usual, tired dialogue about form vs. content, etc. If we can say, with … Read more

What I’ve been reading: lately, Tomas Tranströmer, via The Great Enigma (translated by Robin Fulton). I read Tranströmer obsessively in the early-to-mid 2000s and fell in love with his sequence “Baltics.” I tried to teach “Baltics” twice, first in a seminar on “Poetry and the Uses of History” at Deep Springs College, and then at … Read more