Moving Time! In, like, a year!

So our time here in DC is almost 2/3 done! We'll be moving summer of 2013, and it looks like Montgomery, AL is going to be home for a little while. Probably. I've checked out this neighborhood in Montgomery called Old Cloverdale

that seems awesome. It's got its own gardening group, and house tours, and outdoor musical events, and restaurants, and is not too far away from a Montessori school for Jefferson, although it is on the whole other side of town from the only Catholic school with a kindergarten. So there's that. The premature house search/droolfest has begun! So far I'm in love with one Colonial Revival and a couple Arts and Crafts Revivals that are huge, cheap, and slightly delapidated. And a beautiful Victorian in downtown Montgomery, although I don't know anything about the neighborhood. And one in the Garden District, which had an interesting write-up on ThisOldHouse.com. If I can find one without lead, asbestos, or a leaky roof, we're going to buy it! Remodeling ideas on Pinterest seem to be piling up!

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"Self-Portrait as Medusa in Shock" Jayme Ringleb

"Self-Portrait as Medusa in Shock, " Jayme Ringleb, Puerto Del Sol Online, is such a lovely and challenging ekphrasis. I won't quote any of it, because there is this seductive kind of movement in the poem, like very classy striptease, a dance of veils, or the pulsing of a jellyfish, that when relaxed, its nearly transparent arms floating away from the body, allows you to see more clearly through what when held tightly concealed those mysterious internal structures. The layers of ekphrasis in this poem are constructed like a nesting doll, each stanza with a lovely similarity, a theme, but each leading more intimately to the interior. The poem begins in the natural world of the jellyfish, which is written over by classical myth that shares the creature's name, which in turn is compared to Biblical stories of resurrection, before the poem finally turns toward memoir. There the poem compares this idea of the classical Medusa, being confronted by her own fatal image t...

Ghosts

After Cara Mujer some silences, like soured linens, the too long gone on uncleanness in dreams, smells become characters that speak and move one of you, in a house of so many empty rooms you offer but my child will not sleep a billowing curtain is some historical, hysterical woman in a red floral print she will not quit her haunting until a tall opera singer blasts the hallway with her clear supersonic voice one of you, you come to my house while it is being built, I have to wrestle the door moulding from your hands and ask you to leave one of you, I find you dressed as a teacher in the back pews of religious high school assembly with my old bible/computer science instructor, and I mutter through the sermon and the children ask me to leave these vapors and their faces take so long to wash out

Poem on Poem Ekphrasis: Brian McHale's Feminist Reading of Berryman's Homage to Mistress Bradstreet

In Brian McHale's The Obligation toward the Difficult Whole: Postmodernist Long Poems , he starts his chapter on Susan Howe's The Europe of Trusts with a short introduction to the idea of silence of women and the canon, describing "Berryman's 'Homage'...as a kind of parable" of "the received version of literary historiography" in which women are silent or overwritten (205). McHale argues that Berryman's "poetic 'homage' to the precursor-poet consists in silencing her." (205) Anne Bradstreet , in "Upon a Fit of Sickness" writes, 'Bestow much cost there's nothing lost,/ to make salvation sure,/ O great's the gain, though got with pain, / comes by profession pure." In "Homage to Mistress Bradstreet" , Berryman says as Bradstreet's persona "Hard and divided heaven! creases me. Shame /is failing. My breath is scented, and I throw / hostile glances towards God. " You mig...

Medusa's Head

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