Andrew Dowding

Andrew Dowding lives in Australia.

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Near/Miss launches

New from University of Chicago Press: paper, cloth, e-book
Audible.com has also published an audiobook of my reading of the full work.

William Carlos Williams wrote in his introduction to The Wedge (1944) that “[a] poem is a small (or large) machine made out of words”; or “poetry is the machine which drives it, pruned to a perfect economy. As in all machines, its movement is intrinsic, undulant, a physical more than a literary character.”[i] A poet and physician, Williams is most known for plums, the everyday, minimalistic, rhythmic meter and lineation.

On Lydia Davis's 'In the Train Station'

Al Filreis

In 2017 I moderated an interview/conversation with Lydia Davis. At one point I asked her to read "In the Train Station," a prose poem or microstory I have admired and puzzled over. Then she and I discussed it. A video clip of that exchange is here, below. The transcription was done by Regina Salmons. The text of the piece can be read here. Here is a link to a video recording of an 18-minute discussion of this piece with Anna Strong Safford and erica kaufman (the video is inside the ModPo site; one must register to watch). And here is a 35-minute collaborative close reading (with 20 people) of the same piece which I hosted in San Francisco.