Category: lyrical alignments
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lyrical alignment: Richard Rodriguez
This week’s lyrical alignment is drawn from an interview with writer Richard Rodriguez conducted by Hector A. Torres for the book Conversations with Contemporary Chicana and Chicano Writers (University of New Mexico Press). I came across the passage below from a journal entry during my third year doing the PhD. I remember being struck by […]
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lyrical alignment: The Book of Unknown Americans
I haven’t shared one of my lyrical alignments in a while, so I’m excited to share this one. I’ve also gone ahead and created a new category for them on the side there, so one click can take you to my collective formal experimentations across the years. This week’s lyrical alignment comes from Cristina Henríquez’s […]
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a colorful lyrical alignment
This week’s post features a lyrical alignment of an excerpt from Victoria Finlay’s book Color: A Natural History of the Palette. This is the kind of nonfiction book that tries to break down information through story and personal recollections. Finlay writes of her travels to the places where particular colors are made and goes into the details […]
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gabriel garcia marquez: a lyrical alignment
This week’s poem is a lyrical alignment from Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s prologue to his short story collection Strange Pilgrims. In his prologue – entitled “Why Twelve, Why Stories, Why Pilgrims” – Marquez details the journey of his stories, how some have traveled with him for years and others arrived unexpected. I remember marveling at the […]
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another bolaño lyrical alignment
Here’s another lyrical alignment from Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives. I came across this paragraph “re-aligned” in some old notes from 2008. The scene is of the enigmatic Ulises character described via another character’s story of him. I often describe Bolaño as a poet’s poet. His writing, like that of Borges, is infused with signs of a […]
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william james: a lyrical alignment
So, earlier this week, THIS happened: I’m delighted to share the news of my having become married. 🙂 Those of you who’ve followed me on the Influence for a while may have caught me speaking about a previous divorce. I’m happy to have been keeping up this blog long enough to show that life has […]
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buffett – a lyrical alignment
Sometimes the best advice about the poetry life comes when trying to find out about yourself in non-poetry ways. This rather blank statement springs from a recent reading of Susan Cain’s book Quiet: the power of introverts which takes on the idea of introverts (and extroverts) both as personal, social, and cultural phenomenon. One of the […]
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bolaño: a lyrical alignment
I recently reread Robert Bolaño’s novel “The Savage Detectives.” I first read it in 2008. I had just moved to Oregon after completing my MFA, two years in NYC that were a combination of awe and awful. To be a young poet anywhere is to be confused and enchanted – and able to use words […]
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flynn: a lyrical alignment
I had so much fun with last week’s lyrical alignment (quiet, proper, inner fun, of course) that I’ve gone ahead and cooked up a new one! This week, I’m taking a passage from Gillian Flynn’s novel Gone Girl, a thriller about a wife gone missing. The excerpt below is from the perspective of the husband as […]
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borges: a lyrical alignment
This past week, I found myself reading the essay “Verbiage for Poems” by Jorge Luis Borges (found in On Writing, Penguin Classics), and coming across a marvelous paragraph – emphasis on the ‘marvel,’ something of strange weather patterns moving across the sky in the middle of an ordinary afternoon about this paragraph. In my enthusiasm, I found […]
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