A01=John Wall Barger
Author_John Wall Barger
Blake
Bunuel
Category=ATFA
Category=DNL
Category=DSC
Chris Marker
David Lynch
discursive essays
duende
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
film writing
Gluck
Jean Vigo
Lorca
Mulholland Drive
poetry criticism
poets on poetry
poshlost
Renoir
Ruefle
Sans Soleil
Stalker
Tarkovsky
underglimmer
Zen Buddhism
Product details
- ISBN 9780807181577
- Weight: 272g
- Dimensions: 140 x 216mm
- Publication Date: 31 Jan 2024
- Publisher: Louisiana State University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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A poem is an act of faith because the poet believes in it," contends John Wall Barger in The Elephant of Silence, a collection of essays exploring forms of knowing (and not knowing) that awaken a poetic mind. By considering poetry, film, and the intersections among aesthetic moments and our lives, Barger illuminates the foundations of poetic craft but also probes how to be alive, creative, and open in the world. Each piece investigates unanswerable questions and indefinable words: Lorca's duende, Nabokov's poshlost, Bashō's underglimmer, Huizinga's ludic, Tarkovsky's Zona. Influenced by poets such as Glück and Ruefle, and filmmakers such as Kubrick and Lynch, Barger writes—first always sharing his own personal life stories—on the nature of perception, experience, and the human mind. With lyric eloquence and disarming candor, The Elephant of Silence tackles how to live an imaginative life, how to gravitate toward the silence from which art comes, and how the mystical is also the everyday.
John Wall Barger is the author of six collections of poems, including Smog Mother. An editor for Frontenac House, he lives in Vermont and lectures in the writing program at Dartmouth College.
