Vitalpoetics

Recent Posts

• Resisting the urge to use a ‘KA-PUN’! …I’m so sorry.

  Like myths, which sought to rationalise the human experience through fantastic tales of morality and fatalism, superhero narratives, and the heroes they gave rise to, can be seen to speak to the concerns of the modern world.

• Poetics of Silence I

  Recently, I have been thinking about a deeper silence that dwells beneath things.  This silence sits beneath conversations, beneath tragedies and natural disasters, beneath births…

• Swedenborg’s Oven: Head number Three – Tincture of Belladonna

  I’m still trying to get back to the 6^th of April 1744 – Swedenborg’s 6^th of April that is, the date of his first vision.…

• The Attempt to Say Everything: Gustave Flaubert

  Reading Colin Dray’s recent Vitalpoetics post got me thinking about Gustave Flaubert, firstly as a man whose rebellion against romanticism drove him to explore the…

• From the web this week

  Two related things on the development of the internet from the web this week – Don’t Save the Press by Žiga Turk:

  Print, paper,

  …

• Macondo or McOndo? What I think about when I think about [world] literature

  I was thinking the other day about whether there is any point in demarcating the study of literature according to national borders – university departments…

• Farming the Footnotes for Great Work

  I’ve been revisiting The Tempest again (and truly, is there a better play, ever? okay, maybe Superman: The Musical) and I’ve discovered that my reading…

• Swedenborg’s Oven: Head number Two – A [Radical] Midrash

  Reading Emily Finlay’s first Vitalpoetics post reminded me of an essay Kevin Hart wrote about the poetry of Francis Webb. In “Francis Webb: Unsaying Transcendence”,…

• Impassioned Speech at Exhibition Opening

  Part way through his speech, he was interrupted and jeered at in a manner that seemed utterly incongruous with the slender champagne flutes sparkling in people’s hands…

• Why care about Lascaux

  For those of you unaware of Lascaux, the story is simple – it’s an archaeological site in southwestern France, home to 17,000 year old Upper…