A Mind's Archive

Just for documentation and ease of access purposes

[disc80s]

x

[hendelin]

ooooooohhhhh bennnnn

[poesizing]

intro to lit theory

Authorship: Barthes, Death of the Author; Foucault, What is an Author?

Formalism: Eichenbaum, The Theory of the “Formal Method”;  Brooks, from The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry

Structuralism: Saussure, Course in General Linguistics ; Barthes, from Mythologies

Psychoanalysis: Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams; Lacan, The Mirror Stage & The Significance of the Phallus

Ideology: Althusser, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses; Foucault, Truth and Power

Feminism & Queer: Sedgwick, from Between Men; Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa; Wittig, One Is Not Born a Woman; Butler, Gender Trouble

Deconstruction: Derrida, from Of Grammatology;

Postcolonial: Fanon, from The Wretched of the Earth; Spivak, Can the Subaltern Speak?

Cultural Materialism: Adorno & Horkheimer, The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception; Williams, Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory  

these are about 2/3 of the readings for my intro to lit theory course, if you’ve ever wondered what one studies on such courses, the links lead to free pdfs  

[luthienne]

Richard Hugo, Essay on Poetic Theory: The Triggering Town

[tristealven]

“It took me a long time to realise there are two kinds of writing; the one you write and the one that writes you. The one that writes you is dangerous. You go where you don’t want to go. You look where you don’t want to look.”

— Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (via luthienne)

[metamorphesque]

Leo Tolstoy

Edgar Allan Poe

Kahlil Gibran

Charles Baudelaire

Rainer Maria Rilke

Donna Tartt

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Albert Camus

[lavrinko]

the poets leave hell and again behold the stars  inferno. canto XXXIV.

[geniuss-loci-deactivated2021052]

[mesogeios]

“How then can poetry so transform language that, instead of simply communicating information, it listens and promises and fulfills the role of a god?”

— John Berger, “Once in a Poem,” And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos

[violentwavesofemotion-deactivat]

“No longer was darkness within me, but around me as I became full of meaning. I was carrying freedom. From then on it would be my responsibility.”

— Claire Lejeune, tr. by Linkhorn and Judy Cochran, from “In Mourning No More,”

[cannibalesbians-deactivated2021]

Louise Erdrich, The Butcher’s Wife

[yidquotes]

Fascinatingly, in Hebrew the word for lover, "oheiv," and the word for enemy, "oyeiv," are almost identical. The reason is obvious, they are really one and the same emotion. In both instances one desires to become "one" with the other. In love one wants to merge together, while in hate one desires to swallow the other and incorporate the enemy into himself.

HaRav Yochanan Zweig

[tristealven]

“Poetry is the end for me. It’s always what I go back to, and everything is filtered through that.”

— Terrance Hayes, interviewed by Jeffrey J. Williams for Lit Hub (via bostonpoetryslam)

[grandpasessions]

Cioran / Positivity Culture

[metaphorformetaphor]

The first known poet in history, Enheduanna, was an Iraqi woman. She wrote about Inanna on tablets in the cuneiform language.  The interesting thing about her is that she had a position or title. It was “The keeper of the flame.” I think that if a poet should have any role at all, it should be (wherever and whenever) the same: “keeper of the flame.”

—Dunya Mikhail, from “New Directions Interview with Dunya Mikhail,” Cantos (April , 2010)

[metaphorformetaphor]

The first known poet in history, Enheduanna, was an Iraqi woman. She wrote about Inanna on tablets in the cuneiform language.  The interesting thing about her is that she had a position or title. It was “The keeper of the flame.” I think that if a poet should have any role at all, it should be (wherever and whenever) the same: “keeper of the flame.”

—Dunya Mikhail, from “New Directions Interview with Dunya Mikhail,” Cantos (April , 2010)

[rmscarpathia]

“Poetry approached me in that chaos of raw inverted power and leaned over and tapped me on the shoulder, said, “You need to learn how to listen, you need grace, you need to learn how to speak. You’re coming with me.” I did not walk off into the sunset with poetry, or hit the town with a blaze of gunfire with poetry guarding my back. Rather, the journey toward poetry worked exactly as the process of writing a poem. It started from the inside out, then turned back in to complete a movement. And then on and on in the manner of a ripple in water, a song in the air.”

— Joy Harjo, How We Became Human

[gnossienne]

Margaret Atwood, Power Politics