Category Archives: Form and Theory

These are a series of short papers I wrote for Kathleen Peirce’s Form and Theory class in Spring 2006.

What Animals See When They Look At Us — On The Proximity of Animals, p. II

I have here a postcard of an image from a Bill Viola piece. It shows an enormous white owl looming up, wings spread, behind an ordinary office desk. On the desk one sees the dark outline of a lamp, a … Continue reading

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Rilke and Berger – On the Proximity of Animals (Part I)

A response to Rilke‘s writing on animals, including “A Meeting” and “Mitsou”; John Berger‘s essay “Why Look at Animals?” What’s ultimately denied in the equation of animals in relation to man is the animal in man. This seems obvious, and … Continue reading

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Swings and Misses

– Response to Celan/Borges et al. I put down the book I’m reading to spoon up the last of my cereal and all at once it hits me: the enormous sadness of breakfast transferred from the act of reading to … Continue reading

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Finding Value in the Arts

“New art awakens our resistance insofar as it proposes changes and inversions, some new order, liberates what has been repressed, lets in too early whiffs of an unwelcome future.” — Ted Hughes, “The Hanged Man and the Dragonfly” “I often … Continue reading

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Word Dreams

A response to Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Reverie (“Word Reverie”) and Annie Finch’s Lofty Dogmas. English German Slovene French Welsh Time die Zeit (f) cas (m) temps (m) amser (m) Cash/Money das Geld (n) denar (m) monnaie (f) arian (m) … Continue reading

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Red Dreams

A response to Joseph Albers, “Interaction of Color”; “On Reds,” by Cennino d’Andrea Cennini; and The Primary Colors by Alexander Theroux On the wall in my kitchen there’s a print of Barrett Newman’s famous painting “Be I,” the original of … Continue reading

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Poetry and Time

The single biggest factor shaping new measure in American verse is time. As I listen to Bach I engage in the pleasure of the music’s unhurried pace, its calm assurance in returning to the harmonic center, its way of stringing … Continue reading

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