The Elephant of Silence

Essays on Poetics and Cinema

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by John Wall Barger

Type

Essays

Subject

Theory

Keywords

theory, poetics

Publishing date

2024

Publisher

LSU Press

Language

English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Paperback • 206 pages
5 ½ x 8 ¾ inches (14 x 22 cm)

ISBN

978-0-8071-8157-7

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Book Presentation:
"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 Gl ck 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.

About the Author:
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.

See the publisher website: LSU Press