26 nov 2007

What ever happened to Conrad Aiken? He won all the awards back in his day. Yesterday I played apophatic bookstore for a spell before falling asleep. I also tried to look at my bookshelf at home when I was a kid, where a copy of the Preludes was almost certainly present. Maybe being born in the 1880s Aiken suffered comparisons with Stevens, Eliot, Williams, Pound, H.D., Moore, Stein, Cummings. There doesn't seem much room for a minor modernist.

To play "apophatic bookstore," you simply close your eyes and visit a bookstore in which you once spent a considerable amount of time but which no longer exists, or which you no longer have access to. You wander up and down the stacks and look for books that you might have once browsed through there. I had very specific images last night of books by Kafka and my first glimpse of Magritte. I have spent a good part of my life in bookstores.

3 comentarios:

Ellavon dijo...

My eighth grade teacher told our English class that "Silent Snow, Secret Snow" was based on my life. *laughs*

Joseph Duemer dijo...

When I was 17 I though "The Morning Song of Lord Zero" was a great poem. I went back & looked at it again recently & now I'd say parts of it are pretty good. I think I may have picked up something about lineation from those very long lines in the Preludes.

shanna dijo...

this is my favorite game so far...library would work too (the one in my hometown being pretty small!)