Odds & Ends

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I will be reading in

the Temple Writers Series,

Temple Gallery,

45 North 2nd Street, Philadelphia,

Thursday, February 27^th.

The reading is at 8:00 PM and is free to the public.

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An email from Rae Armantrout on the apophatic:

Dear Ron,

My sense of the "apophatic" is not so much that one "says the unsaid" as that one concentrates upon the unsayable. It's the same impulse that makes figurative art blasphemous in Moslem cultures. I think that in China they say one can never see the entire dragon and in many cultures (Judaism included) to see God is to die.

Speaking of Goddess culture, it is also lethal to catch Artemis at her bath as I recall. (Of course, I could be wrong.) But I think the idea that you can express the unsaid/unsayable in a human symbolic system (directly at least) is contrary to the apophatic way.

Rae

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I recently lavished praise – well-earned – on Kevin Davies’ new poem “Lateral Argument,” which at the time was unpublished. K. Silem Mohammad followed suit with his own equally enthusiastic review. The poem itself is now available in the new Alterran Poetry Assemblage for all to see. I heartily recommend it.

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I also praised Tom Raworth’s Collected Poems for the marvelous volume it is. Readers can now find a list of errata that have been spotted in the text here. There are less than 20 for a book well over 500 pages long. As someone who has always believed Sherrill Jaffe’s admonition that scars make your body more interesting, I’m impressed with how error-free the volume actually is.