Friday, my eldest and I will visit Boston to look
at colored glass and ice and to listen to Elisa Gabbert read from The Self
Unstable. Prose poems; of them, Black Ocean sez, “combines elements of memoir,
philosophy, and aphorism.” Which doesn’t make them sound at all different from
billions of poems. The difference is Elisa—from what I’ve read, the pieces in
The Self Unstable are like lines of her poems and thoughts from her blog, with
some interesting deviations in-between. (An in-between, for instance: “I saw a figure
from a distance and thought it was me. I drink from the opposite side of a
glass.” Make that the opening line of your horror story.)
The book’s design is as eye-catching as all Black
Ocean titles are. You can read quite a lot from the book online—do a simple
search Gabbert+The+Self+Unstable.
Will I seem to mock Elisa, by bringing my six year-old daughter to hear poems about ageing? My daughter, staring up at an end-result? Perhaps my own great age will dull the edge of my daughter's smile.
No comments:
Post a Comment