by Joshua Edwards
Lynn and I are visiting a friend in Rome, a seriously weird place…
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by Joshua Edwards
William Langland is old school. He’s Medieval. About seven years ago I read the 7500 line “B-Text” version of his masterpiece, Piers Plowman. I remember very little about it besides my struggle with Middle English (“And tolde hem tidynges—that tyne thei sholde”), ignorance of Latin (“Ubi thesaurus tuus, ibi et cor tuum.”), and Langland’s wonderful, bawdy humor. Recently however, I’ve been keeping the book on my writing desk, opening it at random and reading a little now and again. It’s been a helpful escape from contemporary poetry and its world, and somehow it has recently converged in my head with Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Guy Davenport’s essay “The Geography of the Imagination,” and several conversations with friends, to force me to think more deliberately about how I use poetry in my life, how it has been used, and what constitutes a poem.
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by Joshua Edwards
(A Short Manifesto in Support of New Efforts)
I was out all day with friends playing basketball and eating Ethiopian food, and I also managed my fantasy baseball teams and watched My So-Called Life. And now I am in such a great mood, surrounded by my books, having done my taxes, Lynn sleeping in the other room, and I think of the limits of learning and its affects on poetic sensibility. Where will poetry go? What must it do? I sit in silence at my messy desk upon which is placed a port of access to all the world and what it’s capable of throwing at its actors.
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by Joshua Edwards
We all know what McDonald’s is and for the most part we’re probably in agreement about what it means. For the purpose of this blog entry, I’m interested primarily in the symbol (to the symbol by way of the smell). Marfa is a small West Texas town with a big reputation and a population of about 2,000. It’s where people live, where people go, and a place I hardly know. That said, I’ve loved my visits there, it smells great, and for me, right now, it means the opposite of McDonald’s (and not just because there’s no McDonald’s there), by which I mean it’s a shame that I’m bending it for my purposes into the realm of the symbolic.
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by Joshua Edwards
Headlines cycling. War, officially-forgotten diseases, hot-shot bailouts, shameless status updating, neglected continents, orchestral indie pop grandeur, absurd year-end best-of lists. It was not a good 12-month stretch for most ideals, people, or animals, it seems. I’ve spent some time thinking of possible names for this past year, and the one that rings truest is “Deepwater Horizon.” What a beautiful, grandiose construction of such simple terms. How snugly it fits our dreams gone awry, our hope misremembered! It would make a fine vintage for a Château Mouton Rothschild, perhaps best enjoyed while eating hors d’oeuvres on the set of the next James Bond film. But enough about the past and its attendant regrets. Instead of a backward glance, I’d like to speculate on the coming year, and I’ll do this with the aid of an online version of the I Ching (which I predict will enjoy a resurgence in 2011, among younger American poets at least). Below are some questions I’m curious about, followed by enticing excerpts from the I Ching replies (Richard Wilhelm translation into German translated by Cary F. Baynes into English, 1950) and my (ridiculous) extrapolations.
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Joshua Edwards directs and co-edits Canarium Books. His translation of María Baranda's Ficticia was published in September 2010 by Shearsman Books, and his first book, Campeche, was just published by Noemi Press. He's currently a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, and from October 2012 until October 2013 he'll be a fellow in residence at Akademie Schloss Solitude in Germany.
