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		<title>Blue and Green: What It Smells and Sounds Like</title>
		<link>http://alisonswan.net/2013/05/blue-green-smells-sounds/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=blue-green-smells-sounds</link>
		<comments>http://alisonswan.net/2013/05/blue-green-smells-sounds/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 16 May 2013 14:08:40 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Alison Swan</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[birds]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Lake Michigan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Saugatuck Dunes]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[wildflowers]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://alisonswan.net/?p=1361</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[You can see that the sun was shining on my head, hot but not too. Here&#39;s what you can&#39;t see: the clean coppery aroma* of last summer&#39;s leaves, pale brown and beginning to curl up from their flattened spots under the gone snow. As for the soundtrack, it was peaceful without being silent, another kind of antidote. In the background, like some sort of sonic under-painting, the roar of Lake Michigan&#39;s surf penetrated the whole scene even though the freshwater sea itself was hidden behind the hills of wooded dunes that make up the shoreline where I live. Here&#39;s what floated up, in the way of noise, from those hills. Amid the spring dazzle of birdsong were the chamber music-like trills and buzzes of song sparrows, and a pileated woodpecker&#39;s drumming and cacophony. Pileateds were the inspiration for Woody the Woodpecker, both his look and his laugh. They&#39;re large loud birds, but decidedly less gregarious than the Warner Brothers cartoon character, heard far more often than seen. The haunting, prehistoric chortling of a few sandhill cranes &#160;floated down through the young leaves from far far overhead. A mile or so in one direction someone ran a leaf blower, a mile or so in another, roofers&#39; nail guns popped again and again as an old cottage got a new roof. And a jon boat motored down the lagoon at the base of the dune on which I happened to be standing photographing the trees. The old lighthouse, accessible best by water, is getting a substantial makeover and the sounds of the project have punctuated these woods since last fall. It would be too easy to call the sounds of the human-built world intrusions. Instead, call them reminders that I belong to a human community. I&#39;m glad I do and anyway I must. Around here, for the most part, our shelters are modest. In a place people have made their living for centuries without displacing most of the wild things that call this home,&#160; modest shelter seems just about perfect&#8212;and, interestingly enough in these crowded times: modern. I&#39;m glad we&#39;ve left room for these mayapples. *As far as I can tell there are three nouns in the English language to name something that just generally smells good: fragrance, aroma, and perfume. Couple this with the fact that we&#39;re racing headlong into lives that are mostly visual and auditory and I see a great opportunity for writers. We need some new words to help us hang onto olfactory knowledge. Borrowing from other languages would be a good place to start. Ideas? (I&#39;ve long thought the same thing about love, but that&#39;s another post.)]]></description>
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		<title>Wallace Stevens: &#8220;There are a lot of things one ought to do&#8221;</title>
		<link>http://alisonswan.net/2013/05/wallace-stevens-there-lot-do/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=wallace-stevens-there-lot-do</link>
		<comments>http://alisonswan.net/2013/05/wallace-stevens-there-lot-do/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 10 May 2013 14:08:04 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Alison Swan</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Asphodel That Greeny Flower]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[poetry]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Wallace Stevens]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[what is found there]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[William Carlos Williams]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://alisonswan.net/?p=1313</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[When is the last time you walked up to a shelf of books&#8212;in your house or somewhere else&#8212;randomly pulled one off the shelf, opened it up, and began reading? It had been a rather long time for me when I found this the other morning, in a beautiful, archival edition of Wallace Stevens&#39;s poems and prose. I&#39;m guessing anyone who&#39;s ever felt thwarted by a house overflowing with family energy will get a kick out of these two short letters, written in the 1920s, when Stevens was in his forties. Dear Miss Moore [the poet Marianne Moore, who at the time was editing the influential Dial magazine]: Sometime ago The Dial sent me Gorham Munson&#39;s note in your November number. I ought to have thanked you, and Munson, too; but there are a lot of things one ought to do. Generally, people look at it the other way: there are a lot of things one ought not to do. And I feel sure that one of the things I ought not to do is review [William Carlos] Williams&#39;s book. What Columbus discovered is nothing to what Williams is looking for. However much I might like to try to make that out&#8212;evolve a mainland from his leaves and floating bottles and boxes&#8212;there is a baby at home. All lights are out at nine. At present there are no poems, no reviews. I am sorry. Perhaps one is better off in bed anyhow on cold nights. Isn&#39;t it cheeky and rich (and wise) to compare writing and reading a book of poems to exploration on par with a search for undiscovered lands? Stevens may have been busy with work and family, but because this note was not deleted&#8211;I mean thrown away&#8211;we know he had a profound appreciation for what can happen in a book of poems and a sense of humor about the ordinary constraints upon his life. I like knowing that even Wallace Stevens experienced a writing drought as he focused for a decade or so upon family life. A couple of years later, Stevens wrote the following to Williams himself:&#160; . . . I&#39;m as busy as the grand Mussolini himself. I rise at day-break, shave etc; at six I start to exercise; at seven I massage and bathe; at eight I dabble with a therapeutic breakfast; from eight-thirty to nine-thirty I walk down-town [These healthful behaviors were not "me time." They were a matter of life and death after blurred vision led to a diagnosis of "acromegalic and overweight, with high blood pressure"], work all day [for the Hartford Insurance Company] . . . go to bed at nine. How should I write poetry, think it, feel it? Mon Dieu, I am happy if I can find time to read a few lines, yours, [Ezra]&#160;Pound&#39;s, anybody&#39;s. I am humble before Pound&#39;s request [for a poem? a review?]. But the above is the above. Note that Stevens gives what little spare energy he has to reading others&#39; poems rather than [...]]]></description>
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		<title>Gary Snyder on Remaining Unprepared</title>
		<link>http://alisonswan.net/2013/04/gary-snyder-remaining-unprepared/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=gary-snyder-remaining-unprepared</link>
		<comments>http://alisonswan.net/2013/04/gary-snyder-remaining-unprepared/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sat, 27 Apr 2013 12:19:38 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Alison Swan</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Gary Snyder]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hopwood Lecture 2013]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[poetry]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[The Practice of the Wild]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Wild]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://alisonswan.net/?p=1274</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[There is no substitute for presence. &#8211; Gary Snyder, April 24, 2013 Sometimes you have to silence your &#34;this is not sensible&#34; voice in order to find the forage you most need. Wednesday, despite being scheduled to give an evening poetry reading in downtown Grand Rapids, I drove from Saugatuck to Ann Arbor to hear Gary Snyder deliver the Hopwood Lecture. Huge wet snowflakes and a ferocious north wind pushed hard against me as I made my way across the University of Michigan&#39;s campus on foot to the grand Rackham Auditorium. A block ahead of me I saw my friend Keith Taylor walking into the same weather, his white hair unmistakable among the groups of students heading the same way. Twenty minutes later I&#39;d be listening to him introduce Snyder, the great poet, environmentalist, and thinker, who, through his written words, has been one of my most important teachers. &#34;Kind of chilly,&#34; Snyder said of the unseasonably cold weather. &#34;Classy,&#34; he said of the venue. I&#39;ve never heard Snyder read or speak without acknowledging the place he and his audience have gathered. He began writing poems at fifteen, Snyder told us, when he wanted to describe the world above the clouds. He meant literally; he&#39;d just summited Mt. St. Helens. Snyder&#39;s work and life make an eloquent argument for the other-than-virtual. Good art, he told us, deals with the &#34;actuality of the phenomenological world.&#34; He also said that art is not church, but that it&#39;s not evil, and that language will survive technology because it is wild (a subject he addresses at length in his indispensible collection of essays, The Practice of the Wild). In Taylor&#39;s introduction, he quoted Practice: &#34;Out walking, one notices where there is food. And there are firsthand true stories of &#39;Your ass is somebody else&#39;s meal&#39;&#8212;a blunt way of saying interdependence, interconnection, &#39;ecology,&#39; on the level where it counts, also a teaching of mindfulness and preparedness.&#34; Many of my environmental studies students, having been primed by reading Thoreau&#39;s &#34;Walking,&#34; immediately see Snyder&#39;s work as, among other things, an argument for literally walking. In addition to summiting many mountains, Snyder has lived a life immersed in poetry, both Eastern and Western, indigenous cultures, Buddhism, and the land. His writing is laced with firsthand accounts of this immersion as it has played out in real time, on location (the Pacific Northwest, Sierra Nevada Mountains, Japan, Australia, Alaska . . .). He found the scroll that&#39;s central to his book-length poem, Mountains and Rivers Without End, in the Cleveland Art Museum, again, literally. In 2013, I&#39;m intrigued by the contrast between information-gathering before and after the internet. Depending upon how you look at, there are more and more reasons to believe (falsely, I think) that it&#39;s all at your fingertips so why go anywhere? So what is &#34;wild,&#34; exactly, per Snyder? Here&#39;s what he said on Wednesday, &#34;A wild horse is a horse that&#39;s living its own life in its own place.&#34; I&#39;ll be mulling that over for [...]]]></description>
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		<item>
		<title>Woodland Wildflowers in the Saugatuck Dunes</title>
		<link>http://alisonswan.net/2013/04/woodland-wildflowers-saugatuck-dunes/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=woodland-wildflowers-saugatuck-dunes</link>
		<comments>http://alisonswan.net/2013/04/woodland-wildflowers-saugatuck-dunes/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 26 Apr 2013 14:07:22 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Alison Swan</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hepatica]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Saugatuck Dunes]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Spring Ephemerals]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[wildflowers]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://alisonswan.net/?p=1256</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[I found a patch of blooming round-lobed hepatica the other day in the still-rather-brown-all-over Saugatuck Dunes. To give you a sense of how tiny these spring ephemerals are, that&#39;s a part of a red oak leaf behind the blossoms. Hepatica are usually the first bits of purple I find in the woods around here each April, opening a full month before the violets. A couple of weeks ago, I found one hepatica bud open on a warm day, but the buds have been closed up tight in the cool weather since. They&#39;re easy to identify because of their large, three-lobed leaves (hidden here). These flowers are one of a myriad of reasons why we fight the spread of garlic mustard&#8212;and stay in the middle of the trail, where they don&#39;t grow.]]></description>
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		<item>
		<title>Keith Taylor&#8217;s New Chapbook</title>
		<link>http://alisonswan.net/2013/04/keith-taylors-chapbook/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=keith-taylors-chapbook</link>
		<comments>http://alisonswan.net/2013/04/keith-taylors-chapbook/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sat, 20 Apr 2013 00:36:46 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Alison Swan</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Alice Greene & Co]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Keith Taylor]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[poetry]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[The Ancient Murrelet]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://alisonswan.net/?p=1218</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[This winter I saw an exhibit of Ellsworth Kelly&#39;s plant lithographs. Large scale and deceptively simple, they felt to me to be nearly perfect art because they seemed to embody, not just the physical being of the various botanical specimens, but a certain person&#39;s encounter with them in a certain moment. I walked around the gallery from print to print, several times. Each visit with each print turned up new details. I&#39;ve been responding to Keith Taylor&#39;s newest chapbook of poems in the same way, circling back and back again, rereading with pleasure, and I highly recommend that you pick up a copy of this lovely little book and do the same. Each of the fifteen short poems in The Ancient Murrelet (Alice Greene &#38; Co.) feels at once knowable and inexhaustible, like the Kelly lithographs. &#34;The Weaver&#34;&#160;particularly caught my attention. More than any of the other poems it emphasizes connection, communion even. The weaver, who is going blind, empties a pillow for swallows who come close enough &#34;to pick / the small ones that catch / in the weaver&#39;s hair.&#34; We can imagine they will weave the feathers into their nests. The weaver&#39;s art moves into a wild bit of land. In &#34;When the Girls Arived in Copenhagen,&#34; two girls, strangers to this place it seems, walk through a neighborhood on &#34;hushed&#34; streets where &#34;snow [falls] in soft piles on their hats,&#34; like the feathers. They/We look through&#160;uncovered windows, where Danes relax in tidy living rooms, reading or &#34;bathed in blue / television light.&#34; The lounging occupants might, or might not, be reading novels about girls walking snow-covered streets. Connection might happen and it might not. The image is beautiful and ambivalent. Beauty is never the main point of Taylor&#39;s poems, at least not conventional beauty (although the music of each one of these poems is strikingly appealing). In another poem there&#39;s a goldfinch, for instance, &#34;dead among the oak leaves,&#34; and in another, a calf separated from its mother by a barbed-wire fence. The bird&#39;s been unburied by raking, a kind of connection; the calf, &#34;I try to lift . . . away from the coyotes.&#34; The ancient murrelet of the title poem&#8212;&#34;lost or brave or blown here&#34; from the North Pacific&#8211;ends up at &#34;the dirty mouth / of a river that drains / the abandoned car factories // of South Bend.&#34; The same poem points out that nearby &#34;the untouched / but beautiful young / run down the beach in summertime.&#34; &#160;Taylor immortalizes all of these things, which, together, strike me as complexly, disarmingly, beautiful. I&#39;ve always admired the fact that Taylor&#39;s poems enact a habit that anyone who needs wild nature but lives far from old-growth ecosystems will recognize. His speakers find it wherever they can in the rich mix of the human and other-than-human&#8212;a commingling that turns out to be as eloquent as tapestry. &#34;The Lavender Farm,&#34; for instance,&#34; gives us cultivated &#34;royal rows of color&#34; &#34;between two old dunes,&#34; and &#34;Screech Owl; Early Evening,&#34; [...]]]></description>
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		<title>Analog Clocks</title>
		<link>http://alisonswan.net/2013/04/analog-clocks/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=analog-clocks</link>
		<comments>http://alisonswan.net/2013/04/analog-clocks/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 05 Apr 2013 13:11:30 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Alison Swan</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Analog Clocks]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Digital Clocks]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Maps]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Time]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://alisonswan.net/?p=1176</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Analog clocks&#8212;I love them. I photographed these last weekend. Anybody recognize them? When you look at the hands and face of an analog clock you&#39;re looking at the past, present, and future, at once: a half day, so to speak, at least a kind of map of a half day. The hands (which are really more like arms) sweep around the face (which has its features, when it has them&#8212;numerals or dashes or, say, songbirds&#8212;arranged around the outside edge). In comparison, the little lit green numerals on our stovetop are as ineloquent as the fake clicks of our smart phones. Telling time with a digital clock seems a little bit to me like navigating via a map on a smart phone, useful enough, but&#160;constraining. One closes down time. The other closes down space. Funny how much context matters. Seven hundred or so years ago, when churches began building some of the earliest analog clocks in towers, of steel, they accelerated the growth of time consciousness. As it was the Middle Ages, however, the main impetus was to signal that it was time to pray: in other words, to pause. By the Industrial Revolution, however, clocks were akin to slave drivers, especially for the human cogs in the machine. Today, timepieces are practically necessities of life. When our daughter was learning to tell time, we did tuck our digital clocks away. Her very first bedside clock was pink plastic with an illuminated ivory face&#8212;a full moon in a sunset sky. We hoped she&#39;d grow up knowing how to read analog clocks at a glance. She did. Add a y to analog, and you&#39;ve got analogy&#8212;a strictly human concept, one that cannot exist without imagination. What (so-called) anachronism sparks your imagination?]]></description>
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		<title>Blackout Poetry in Rural Michigan</title>
		<link>http://alisonswan.net/2013/03/blackout-poetry-rural-michigan/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=blackout-poetry-rural-michigan</link>
		<comments>http://alisonswan.net/2013/03/blackout-poetry-rural-michigan/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 22 Mar 2013 17:30:57 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Alison Swan</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Austin Kleon]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Blackout Poetry]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Erasure Poetry]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Gobles Middle School]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Mary Ruefle]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://alisonswan.net/?p=1122</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The other evening, on my way out of a middle-school basketball game, several towns southeast of home, I was stopped in my tracks by a wall arrayed with taped-up book pages, each one, blacked over, line by line, except for a bright scatter of words, a kind of reverse highlighting. Even from a distance, it looked interesting. &#34;I wonder if they know about Mary Ruefle!&#34; I exclaimed to my husband and daughter as we walked up to take a closer look. Mary, who&#39;s now quite well known for her Erasure Poems, was one of my poetry teachers. One of the first poems that caught my eye was created by Audrey: &#34;Moonlight / a fierce green giant / a stone creature growing still.&#34; Beautiful, I thought, and remembered one of the first books of poems I read cover to cover, Selected Poems of H.D. &#160;In a poem called &#34;Heat,&#34; which I memorized because I loved its sounds, H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) writes, &#34;fruit cannot fall into heat / that presses up and blunts / the points of pears.&#34; A few wall tiles over, I found Jaylene&#39;s wisdom: &#34;High school / what makes you think / everyone knows what / you / have ended up / in / who / cares / most of the kids have problems / too / you&#8217;re sixteen / it&#39;s not your fault.&#34; Right away I was carried back to my own teen years, lying alone in the dark listening to loud music, worrying and wondering what might lie ahead. &#34;You&#39;re so long ago and so far away, but my dream lives on forever,&#34; sang Todd Rundgren. Thank you, Audrey and Jaylene, for reminding me of all that. More than a few students got me to look at familiar words in new ways. I admire the way Sabrina uses &#34;living&#34; (and the way she turned &#34;he&#34; into &#34;her&#34;): &#34;He / r / eyes / stare / back to escape / the / people / Perhaps / the / living / frightened / h / er.&#34; And look what happens with a magazine title in Jacob&#39;s poem: &#34;Soap / dribbles his / bathroom / in a / National Geographic / minute.&#34; There were dozens more poems&#8212;I wish I had room here for all of them&#8212;and on the spot I resolved to find the teacher and, if I could, learn more. To drive into Gobles, Michigan (pop. 829), is to drive into twenty-first-century rural Anywhere, Midwest, a part of the United States that has been particularly hard hit, in every way, at first by a willy-nilly construction craze, and then by a recession. Commercial buildings and parking lots&#8212;many newly empty&#8212;line the main routes between between small downtowns that largely collapsed in the 1970s. Encountering any place from a car leaves it silent and surface and uninhabited. I&#39;m glad that I got out of mine, walked back into Gobles Middle School, spent more time with the poems (and their voices), and met the teacher who&#39;d introduced her seventh-grade students to Blackout [...]]]></description>
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		<title>The Next Big Thing: We Live Here</title>
		<link>http://alisonswan.net/2013/03/big-thing-live/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=big-thing-live</link>
		<comments>http://alisonswan.net/2013/03/big-thing-live/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 14 Mar 2013 13:39:56 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Alison Swan</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Alison Swan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Holly Wren Spaulding]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Libby Wagner]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Patricia Clark]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[The Next Big Thing]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://alisonswan.net/?p=1096</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Thank you Holly Wren Spaulding for tagging me in this community effort to talk about our book projects with each other. This set of questions is all over the web right now, with answers from people who are working on books. It&#39;s not the easiest thing in the world to write about your own writing. See what you think about how I&#39;ve done. I&#39;ve tagged&#160;Patricia Clark and Libby Wagner. They&#39;ll be answering the questions too. Holly is a poem whisperer, the real deal. Along with making delicately powerful poems of her own, she is present, through her workshops and website, at the instigation of many, including mine. What is the working title of your book?&#160;We Live Here Where did the idea come from for your book?&#160;Many of these poems began as witness to specific land, in Aldo Leopold&#39;s sense of the word, which expands beyond the dirt beneath our feet to include the web of life inhabiting it, literally. I hope they develop into something that explores my grief and delight&#8212;and the tension between the two&#8212;as I encounter the world as it is now, the only world we have. These particular poems insisted upon becoming part of something larger. The title comes from my ongoing fascination with the way certain places are considered more universally relevant than others. I happen to know very well a number of places, teeming with life (human and otherwise), that are not generally considered relevant to people elsewhere. Of course for those who live in them they are exquisitely relevant, because they&#160;live there. It seems important to note that we don&#39;t have to cross oceans to find them. What genre does your book fall under?&#160;Poetry. What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?&#160;A movie rendition? I know there is an inventive filmmaker out there who could take my grief and delight and turn it into film, but since I know so little about the people who do these things, I&#39;m at a loss. What is the one sentence synopsis of your book?&#160;&#34;We live here&#34;!&#8211;if each word is allowed its full range of meanings. How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?&#160;I&#39;ve heard a number of poets answer this question by noting that it took a lifetime to write the poems, and while that seems ever so slightly glib, it&#39;s apt. Sometimes my poems happen quickly. Others evolve over years. This book has been in process for a long time. Who or what inspired you to write this book?&#160;Each poem has its own little genesis story. A great many of them arose directly from walks outdoors, under the sky, across familiar pieces of land, while I heeded whatever words and images were insisting I pay attention to them. What else about your book might pique the reader&#8217;s interest?&#160;A short while back I re-encountered the phrase &#34;post-wild world&#34; in a book title. (I can&#39;t recall where I first read it.) My immediate reaction [...]]]></description>
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		<title>Art As Breathing Pause: Rebecca Brand</title>
		<link>http://alisonswan.net/2013/01/art-breathing-pause-2/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=art-breathing-pause-2</link>
		<comments>http://alisonswan.net/2013/01/art-breathing-pause-2/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 18 Jan 2013 17:16:29 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Alison Swan</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[BFA Thesis]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[DeVries Student Gallery]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Rebecca Brand]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Richmond Center]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Within and Apart by Rebecca Brand]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[WMU Environmental Studies]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://alisonswan.net/?p=1050</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Last month&#8212;December, the month of blur for me, every single year&#8212;there were a few memorable moments of clear. I am grateful for every one, and in particular, for Rebecca Brand&#39;s BFA Thesis Exhibition at the Richmond Center for Visual Arts on the campus of Western Michigan University. Rebecca named her exhibit&#160;Within and Apart&#160;because this comes closest, for her, to describing in words what she explores when she makes art: the human relationship to the wild world. I stood for a long time looking at a muskrat&#39;s-eye-view video of a construction site represented by disturbed ground and a single orange plastic survey flag flipping in the breeze. The audio? Snapping plastic and distant vehicle traffic. In part, the making of the piece was a form of witness. I was trying to join in. In any case, the site has already become a condominium complex named&#160;Walden Woods, by now utterly woods-less and far from anything resembling Thoreau&#39;s experiment at Walden Pond. Above me, the 3,000 feet of rope Rebecca had dyed green then woven singlehandedly from wall to wall to ceiling to wall, and so on, with the help of a ladder, both divided and linked the space and viewers. Rebecca explains in her artist statement, &#34;I use rope to represent the innumerable connections within the natural world as well as the effect of the human element.&#34; Installation took hours. Her mother, who had watched, said Rebecca looked like she was dancing. The exhibition was up for five days in December. Please leave your comments here and I&#39;ll share them with Rebecca.]]></description>
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		<title>Love, An Index&#8211;Poems on Love and Grief</title>
		<link>http://alisonswan.net/2012/12/love-index-poems-love-grief/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=love-index-poems-love-grief</link>
		<comments>http://alisonswan.net/2012/12/love-index-poems-love-grief/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sat, 08 Dec 2012 14:48:50 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Alison Swan</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Love An Index]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Poems on Grief]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Poems on Love]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Rebecca Lindenberg]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://alisonswan.net/?p=1027</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Poetry might be the wildest retro-thing going in the literary world, especially when it appears in print inside an artful hardcover that can be carried anywhere and accessed forever off the grid, especially when it appears to be &#34;powerful emotion recollected in tranquility&#34;&#8211;without being too tidied up, or too spontaneous. Rebecca Lindenberg&#39;s Love, An Index (San Francisco: McSweeney&#39;s, 2012) is such a book. I&#39;ve been reading it for months, as I often do with books of poems, and I&#39;m still encountering new resonances. Lindenberg&#39;s beloved life partner of seven years, the poet Craig Arnold, disappeared in 2009 while hiking in Japan. Love, An Index&#160;shares Lindenberg&#39;s howl of grief and longing with anyone willing to do the good work of reading poems that do not always give up their meaning easily (and sometimes do). Just how clear are grief or longing, ever, really? The poems allow Lindenberg to lasso the emotions without taming them. The heart of the book is the longish title poem, a mini-dictionary which supplies connotations for a host of words that tragedy has transformed. Other poems explore Lindenberg&#39;s emphasis on the fact that language is as dynamic as life, including, &#34;Losing&#160; a Language: a Phrasebook&#34; and &#34;Love, N1,&#34; a five-page long reimagining of the word&#39;s meaning. The book closes with six pages of notes&#8212;mostly authors and titles&#8211;and two of thanks, leaving the impression &#160;Lindenberg has survived the tragedy as much by reading and friendship as by writing.&#160;I&#39;m especially interested in the notes because the best poems are grown in the fertile humus of many-words-that-came-before, a sort of language ecosystem. Love, An Index includes a map of the place it was born.]]></description>
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