The dramaturg, writer, and teacher Matthew Goulish reflects on the practice of reading poetry, of reading just one poem: 'Kingfisher' by Ed Roberson. How to attend, to follow the course of poem as a waterway, to recognise in its surface tension impending drops, hidden obstacles, and disguised turns? How also and at the same time to attend to an interruption - an accidental sighting - with equal curiosity? Sincerity follows the lines of the poem inside and outside, inward and outward, drawing in a series of correspondences and correspondents, roots and sources, until reading becomes a collective endeavor; the words of Ed Roberson, Michelle Sherburne, Renee Gladman, and Lyn Hejinian are also here. As the subject of this particular poem surfaces, to catch a glimpse is not so obviously a gift: the practice of catching sight might also be injurious to another's freedom. And so we follow the trail of the poem through Smuggler's Notch.
The dramaturg, writer, and teacher Matthew Goulish reflects on the practice of reading poetry, of reading just one poem: 'Kingfisher' by Ed Roberson. How to attend, to follow the course of poem as a waterway, to recognise in its surface tension impending drops, hidden obstacles, and disguised turns? How also and at the same time to attend to an interruption - an accidental sighting - with equal curiosity? Sincerity follows the lines of the poem inside and outside, inward and outward, drawing in a series of correspondences and correspondents, roots and sources, until reading becomes a collective endeavor; the words of Ed Roberson, Michelle Sherburne, Renee Gladman, and Lyn Hejinian are also here. As the subject of this particular poem surfaces, to catch a glimpse is not so obviously a gift: the practice of catching sight might also be injurious to another's freedom. And so we follow the trail of the poem through Smuggler's Notch.