epoetica

Hello. My name is Eliza. What’s yours?
My name is Ida Bauer.
All right, let’s get started. What’s on your mind, Ida?
Where is Dr Freud?
Come on, Ida. Where do you think?
I think he is avoiding me.
What was going through your mind when you began to believe he is avoiding you?
I wonder if he has given up on me.
Don’t you also have given up on you?
That is why I came to him. To get help. Or was I forced? I don’t remember.
You do too remember.
My father…

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My friend JH tells me there are two kinds of writers/critics: clumpers and splitters. She is a splitter: she looks for cracks and holes in arguments, seeks to define within terms by examining critical differences. She has an eye for nuance: a born deconstructor. I, on the other hand, am a clumper. I want to draw similarities between the disparate, construct elaborate histories based on tenuous relationships. If this is any indication, my favorite television show growing up was the BBC show Connections, in which James Burke would wander through history drawing together the most unlikely ideas and technologies to produce a magical story (here’s a sample episode).

So, in my clumping mode, I’m going to be working on a series of ideas that are only really related through my telling of them. Here’s the starting point: What do Sir Walter Ralegh, Sigmund Freud, and the Emacs editor have in common? This is going to be a convoluted and not particularly apropos piece of history, but I promise it will be clear by the end. Maybe.

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you said Is

you said Is
there anything which
is dead or alive more beautiful
than my body,to have in your fingers
(trembling ever so little)?Looking into
your eyes Nothing,i said,except the
air of spring smelling of never and forever…..and through the lattice which moved as
if a hand is touched by a
hand(which
moved as though
fingers touch a girl’s
breast,
lightly)Do you believe in always,the wind
said to the rain
I am too busy with
my flowers to believe,the rain answered

Can a poem be implied?

Create detailed “stage directions” for the piece.  Be as empirical, phenomenological, or philosophical as you like.  Use any means or media to communicate your directions.You have until July 15th! Until then, take the time to read and comment on your colleague’s work.

[I decided to write an essay this week.  Tucked away are a series of “Humiliating Hypermedia Insights.”  These are not profound insights by any means.  They are obvious to any careful observer.  But in the course of having them, I feel humiliated.  Things I did not write about in this essay, but wish I did, are twe Greek terms for time: chronos  and kairos, whose distinct meanings might help us explore the English language’s limited capacity to deal with one of life’s most profound mysteries.]

I begin this symposium with a certain advantage.  I have an inside knowledge of the weekly assignments because I wrote them up myself.  So, what I lack in knowledge, talent, and skills, I make up for in prescience.  I know the order of things before they unfold—not through intuition or anticipation or precognition—but through the conceptualization of the symposium as a whole.  What is for some the beginning of a span of time broken into five week-long periods, each marked with the introduction of a new task, is for me a single, organized event.  You get surprises, I struggle with expectations.  At least this is how these things are supposed to go in theory. Read more