Or, Tyler’s Making Progress
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The past half-year I’ve been consumed with dissertation preparations: narrowing down a topic, questioning that topic, narrowing it again, compiling a bibliography around which my comprehensive exams will be built, drafting a dissertation proposal, revising that proposal, and revising again, then again. And I’ve only really just begun. Now that my proposal [...]
Series intro and Mormon Poets Roll
Wading through Segullah’s archives some time ago, I found a poem that really caught me off guard: “Spindrift” by Marie Brian. The thing that struck me first about “Spindrift” is its (Emily) Dickinsonian style: seemingly random, mid-sentence capitalizations, the hyphens, the brevity. The tone, however, is considerably more hopeful, more [...]
Series intro and Mormon Poets Roll
Note: I thought a post to honor Linda Sillitoe and her encounter with Mormon letters would provide a suitable launching point for the series. She passed away April 7, 2010. Exponent II has published a tribute for Sillitoe in their latest issue.
One of the most striking poems I’ve read recently [...]
Something Old, Something New, Something . . . Stolen
Since April 2009, as part of my (meager) commitment to raise the profile of Mormon poetry, I’ve been investing off and on in what I’ve called my Mormon Poetry Project, offering short readings of poems by Mormon poets on my personal blog. My ground rules: 1) the [...]
I’ve been working on a number of projects lately, including my own poetry. What follows is the result of my ekphrastic mash-up of two images: Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus (1481) and galen dara’s married (2008). A strip of the latter painting was featured in the banner of The Exponent II’s website a couple weeks [...]
I pick up today where I left off yesterday.
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Across the Ironic Distance: Negotiating the Narrative Gaps
Each of the ten stories in Where Nothing Is Long Ago deals with the protagonist’s (Budge’s) efforts to negotiate her way into this awareness and through or into some aspect of life [...]
Note: This is the first post in a two part serialization of a seminar paper I wrote this last semester for a class in the modern(ist) short story sequence. As examples of the genre, we read Dubliners, Winesburg, Ohio, In Our Time, Go Down, Moses, The Golden Apples, The Maples’ Stories, and Cathedral. Along [...]
Liberating Paradox(i)es: Tensions, Texts of Comparison, Twitter, and Emma Lou Thayne
After finishing part 3 with a reading of Timothy Liu’s short poem, “The Tree that Knowledge Is”—a reading based in and flowing from a nodal model of Mormon culture—I fully intended to move into an extended exploration of Waterman’s suggestions for Mormon criticism: 1) read [...]
