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 suffer from a malady that could best be described as big-tentism or maybe as omni-sympathetica. I find it easy both to be captured by narratives of many different types and to be hyper-critical of narratives of many different types. On the one hand this is a good thing: I like to read everything from [...]

I was startled recently to find myself described (in response to my review of Alan Williams’s novel Ockham’s Razor) as acting like a gatekeeper for Mormon literature. Partly this was because I had seen my comments mostly as definitional rather than exclusionary: Ockham’s Razor is a book of type X, as opposed to type Y. [...]

The Grand Theatre in Salt Lake recently finished their run of Margaret Blair Young’s I Am Jane, but I am very glad that the show is also going to the Covey Center for the Arts in Provo, UT, on July 22-23.  I am glad because I want to shout from the rooftops to everyone who will [...]

In the early days of AMV, I wrote briefly about the limitations of urban(e) critics who were trying to review Napoleon Dynamite and failing to get their minds around what Jared and Jerusha Hess were doing. I never reported back on that, but after watching the film several years later, I discovered that, yes, I was right [...]

In her collections of essays Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays (Amazon), Zadie Smith deals brilliantly with the collision of the liberation that comes from the death of the Author (as represented by Roland Barthes) and the demands of craft and control from the author (as represented by Vladimir Nabokov). Or as she puts it: “In my [...]