Writing Trauma: Notes of Transcendence, #6—Memoir’s Ladder to Recovery
Through his words, the writer calls for change. He transforms traumatic experience from a state of helpless victimhood into one of empowered transcendence.
Loss
Writing Trauma: Notes of Transcendence, #5—The Objective Correlative
Caldwell’s memoir is a deep exploration into how human and human-animal connections can heal us from traumatic experiences.
L’Appel du Vide: On Visual Caesuras and Erasure
I take the five students of my poetry micro-workshop outside to discuss Claudia Emerson’s latest collection Impossible Bottle. As we sit in the sun, bending over the brilliant bright book pages, a student points to the poem “Metastasis: Web” and volunteers to read it aloud before our analysis of the author’s craft choices. You—join us….
On and Of the Page: The Life–Art Collapse
A few years ago at a conference, I read a section from my long poem “Sublimation” in which the speaker describes a miscarriage that, in its vicious pain and effusions, wakes her up in the middle of the night. After the reading, as I was mingling my way toward the wine, two women approached me….