A review of 'Spellbound: The Art of Teaching Poetry'
I collect poetry handbooks — as if by simply possessing them I could conquer my teaching anxieties. I’ll also admit that I have rarely, if ever, used the exercises and prompts in these how-to’s — neither the ones in Robin Behn and Chase Twichell’s The Practice of Poetry or in Kenneth Koch’s classic Rose, Where Did You Get That Red?, nor in any of the others. Pleasure lies in reading these books the way armchair cooks read recipes: intellectually savoring subtle combinations of flavors and forms while never tasting them in the kitchen.
I collect poetry handbooks — as if by simply possessing them I could conquer my teaching anxieties. I’ll also admit that I have rarely, if ever, used the exercises and prompts in these how-to’s — neither the ones in Robin Behn and Chase Twichell’s The Practice of Poetry or in Kenneth Koch’s classic Rose, Where Did You Get That Red?, nor in any of the others. Pleasure lies in reading these books the way armchair cooks read recipes: intellectually savoring subtle combinations of flavors and forms while never tasting them in the kitchen.
Boland and Cinti's flask menagerie: Hair-growing cacti, Martian roses, and living mirrors
A succulent growing human hair in Howard Boland and Laura Cinti’s Cactus Project is an inquiry into primate/plant interrelations, indirectly following up on (by inverting) Whitman’s vision of a poet’s body as an overgrown swamp or canebrake. Bio-art can now perform horizontal gene transfers across species lines, and so Thoreau’s desire to be “the corn and the grass and the atmosphere writing” can also be partially realized in experiments that test the boundaries between humans and their often unruly crops.