#prac crit

[complexmeta4s]

my friend George’s prac crit annotations of David Foster Wallace, 2021 

[merulae]

There’s this disharmony between what a poem is meant to be – beautiful, transcendent – and the actual wretchedness of its source.

Emily Berry, in conversation with Natalya Anderson from Prac Crit

[honeymooninthefridge]

Ocean Vuong on form and rupture/PRAC CRIT

[complexmeta4s]

Critics, as 'barking dogs,' on this view, are of two sorts: those who merely relieve themselves against the flower of beauty, and those, less continent, who after-wards scratch it up. I myself, I must confess, aspire to the second of these classes; unexplained beauty arouses an air of irritation in me, a sense that this would be a good place to scratch; the reasons that make a line of verse likely to give pleasure, I believe, are like the reasons for everything else; one can reason about them; and while it may be true that the roots of beauty ought not to be violated, it seems to me very arrogant of the appreciative critic to think that he could do this, if he chose, by a little scratching.

william empson, seven types of ambiguity 

[merulae]

Jorie Graham in conversation with Sarah Howe from Prac Crit

[complexmeta4s]

9  The good word said I am not pressed  For time. I have all the foxglove day  And all my user's days to give  You my attention. Shines the red  Fox in the digitalis grove.  Choose me choose me. Guess which  Word I am here calling myself  The best. If you can't fit me in  To lying down here among the fox  Glove towers of the moment, say  I am yours the more you use me. Tomorrow  Same place same time give me a ring.

from ‘Approaches to How They Behave’, W. S. Graham  

[complexmeta4s]

[T]he reader is the one that goes to a book always secretly hopeful that this time this work might be *the* work, offering revelation. He or she knows well enough, of course, that it is naive to think so; but such is the primal ancient drive for the reader as an incorrigible hunter for meaning that the desire for the message abides, even though no literal answer could possibly suffice and the chastening of the appetite for over- directness is often necessary. Yet if on any particular occasion this book is, once again, not *the* book—knowing indeed there may never again be any such thing as *the* book, as the Bible once was—then something in this book, some one sentence perhaps, may be the smaller equivalent.

philip davis, ‘reading and the reader’, 2013

[complexmeta4s]

…you remember how Proust, at the end of that great novel, having convinced the reader with the full sophistication of his genius that he is going to produce an apocalypse, brings out with pathetic faith, as a fact of absolute value, that sometimes when you are living in one place you are reminded of living in another place, and this, since you are now apparently living in two places, means that you are outside time, in the only state of beatitude he can imagine.

william empson