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Travel Like a Poet and Take a Sensory Odyssey

12/31/201812/31/2018
by Hannah Huff

A GUIDEBOOK TO LEARNING HOW TO SEE, HEAR, SMELL, TOUCH, AND TASTE LIKE A TRUE POET WHEN YOU JOURNEY

As you scuttle to and fro back home or on getaways among the throngs this winter and beyond — hightailing it along interstates; or flying above titian crags and sun-gilded prairies; or slowly rowing across a mercurial lake; or sitting on a Greyhound bus that stops every 4 miles (only 982 miles to go!); or rattling into a time-warp sleep on a passenger train; or clinging for dear life on the metallic saffron-hued top of a freight train boxcar because you wanted to save a pretty penny; or walking to your family’s house because you decided to be healthy, only to arrive four days later because they live 78 miles away, long after the leftover potatoes have been eaten — certainly you’ll get bored.

After all, infrastructure, with it erasure of natural landscapes and infusion of artificial hubs, signage, and paths, can induce a mental lethargy over the long distances and tenures of “along the way.” But during each journey, if you learn to look, listen, sniff, graze, and taste creatively — if you learn to perceive the sensory smorgasbord of passing environs like a real-life-real-live poet — you can come to appreciate the “getting to” almost as much as the destination where hot coffee, a soft floral patterned quilt, and a room with a view awaits. It’s time to poeticize the prosaic experience of travel and peregrinate like a poet on an ancient odyssey.

Reader Lifestyle

Here’s the Scoop on Live Poetry Readings

12/15/201802/24/2023
by Hannah Huff

HOW TO FIND AND EXPERIENCE LIVE POETRY EVENTS NEAR YOU LIKE A TRUE MEMBER OF THE LITERATI

So you want to listen to a live poetry reading? Enamored with the printed word, you’ve recently been badgered by the thought that verse might be even better if you hear the words reverberated straight out of the horse’s mouth (and poets do tend to be quite horse-faced).

You dream of sitting rapturously as Frank O’Hara reads “Having a Coke with You” or Gertrude Stein mesmerizes the room with “OBJECTS” from Tender Buttons. Motivated, you realize that you have no idea what a poetry reading is like, let alone how to find one. Do they take place in secret rooms hidden behind bookcase doors? Do cedar incense and absinthe vapors wraith across the stage and infuse the poet with cosmic wisdom? Do the events conclude with a naked dance at sunrise? Who knows?

I do! You’ve come to the right place to figure out how to get to the right places to get some good stanzas in your earholes.

Book Review

‘Essayism’ by Brian Dillon is Dark, Bright Bricolage

11/28/201802/24/2023
by Hannah Huff

A BOOK REVIEW OF BRIAN DILLON’S ESSAYISM: ON FORM, FEELING, AND NONFICTION

Bricolage. Collage. Geodes. Bright silver ore running through boulders. Jagged fragments. Stained glass shatters. Crystalline snowflakes, gathered. All of these descriptions come to mind when trying to define Brian Dillon’s collection of essays on essays entitled Essayism: On Form, Feeling, and Nonfiction. And I think the author would approve, since his work revels in the curious lists, fragments, and assemblages found in compositions both familiar and obscure.

Reader Lifestyle

The Best Study Music Playlist for Deep Thinkers

11/17/201802/24/2023
by Hannah Huff

A 20-SONG SELECTION OF THE CHOICEST INSTRUMENTAL SONGS FOR READING, WRITING, AND BROODING

If you’re tired of hearing your own heavy breathing while you read, write, and think, you can tune in to the melancholy drone of society’s machines wafting through your window, or you can put on some music. But not just any music — you need songs that sprawl, that are small, that chill, that transport, that center. You need The Best Study Music Playlist for Deep Thinkers (click the link for the uninterrupted playlist, and continue reading for a piece-by-piece synopsis). This 20-track instrumental goldmine has been carefully curated by a full-time reader, writer, and brooder (that’s me!) to ensure that its segmented sonic ambience doesn’t intrude upon your deep thoughts, but instead intensifies your cerebral wanderings.

Discover Literature

Dear Bad Writers, Read This Poetic Line Breaks Guide

11/08/201802/24/2023
by Hannah Huff

STEP UP YOUR POETRY GAME WITH BETTER LINE BREAKS AND ENJAMBMENT

What makes a poem, a poem? Long story short, poetic line breaks. Of course, many other literary elements fuse to make poems croon, but poetry is visibly distinct from prose because its lines are sundered before the page’s natural end, at clearly calculated points. Poems are dialogues between the presence that is the text and the absence that is the white space revealed.

Literary Analysis

Here’s Why These 5 Creative Book Titles Work

11/01/201802/24/2023
by Hannah Huff

A Brief Literary Analysis of Book Names that Resonate

Book titles beckon: from spines and covers, they yoo-hoo in froufrou fonts to prospective readers. Titles are oracles: they augur what unread pages contain. Titles identify: they turn paper piles into cohesive things, heaps into sheaves. Titles are thresholds: readers can’t enter texts without crossing the titular line. Titles frame: in minimal words, they explain what it all meant, why it was all so blue or golden or so on. Titles, though they precede, follow: texts gain names only once they’ve been written. Titles connote: they’re word clusters that conjure up paragraphs read while sick in bed on a cold winter day as the dog yipped in the yard and the world continued on in distant horns and smog. Titles can trick: bad texts sometimes bear creative book titles, and the best books can be rather brusque in their names. Above all, book titles promise: a story, a secret, a journey, a love, a moment.

Despite all this, even literary readers tend to grant a book’s title only a second’s thought before moving on to another text, or to the first page. Today, we’re going to pause and analyze, taking our time with 5 creative book titles that resonate with me for very different reasons.

Literary Analysis

Historical Erasure & Common Moments in Brooks’s ‘Maud Martha’

10/21/201802/24/2023
by Hannah Huff

A LITERARY ANALYSIS OF THE NARRATIVE IMPLICATIONS OF THE VIGNETTE STRUCTURE OF GWENDOLYN BROOKS’S 1953 NOVEL

The only novel written by poet Gwendolyn Brooks, Maud Martha (1953) is structured as a series of 34 vignettes/chapters that range from 2 to 20 pages, with the average less than 10. The poetic narrative traces the life ray of Maud Martha Brown from around age six, up until her pregnancy with a second child (she seems to be in her late twenties by the final chapter). This ray is formed both through the content that is present — the described action in the vignettes — and the content that is absent — the unsaid that happens between the vignettes. In the rapid passage of time “off-stage,” and the pausing on often seemingly banal activities, Brooks’s fragmented structure exposes history’s relentless erasure of marginalized narratives, and reveals the corresponding therapeutic importance of paying attention to the feat of surviving everyday moments as Maud is marginalized as a young black woman.

Book Review

‘The Nature of Photographs’ Is as Rich as Prose-Poetry

10/17/201810/17/2018
by Hannah Huff

A BOOK REVIEW OF STEPHEN SHORE’S NONFICTION PHOTOGRAPHY PRIMER

In this era of unlimited image feeds, selfies, and pictures appropriated for tawdry catch-phrases (memes, gifs, etc.), rarely do non-photographers pause to consider the basic elements that unite to compose a photo. We’re all bleary-eyed from bad pictures. Indeed, while many of us ordinary picture-takers can recognize when we take a nice photo, perhaps of a shadow resting in a clavicle, we can’t pinpoint why that particular image turned out to be so effective, and why the picture that we took of our foot turned out to be just an unattractive photo of our foot. To rein in chance and increase the probability of taking good pictures, we need to understand the nature of photographs — to see how what they’re made of affects how we experience them. And that’s what the nonfiction text, The Nature of Photographs: A Primer by Stephen Shore offers the rookie image-taker: an introduction to the intrinsic ingredients of photographs and how to identify these features when contemplating pictures.

Reader Lifestyle

Visit These 10 SoCal Literary Landmarks

10/09/201802/24/2023
by Hannah Huff

THE BEST SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA DESTINATIONS FOR CHEAP BOOKS, VIBRANT POETRY, AND LITERARY INSPIRATION

Southern California — land of murky mauve smog twilight, wildlife neighbors prowling and howling at their loss, the time-altering flows of heavy traffic and tight parking, sea foam cleaned beaches, palpitating concert halls, brick and amber-sheen-wood buildings clashing with glass monoliths, walls transfigured by colorful calligraphy, creativity pickled for preservation amid suburban dearths, bustle and lethargy sitting kitty-corner, and art floating particulate amid the brume of all of this — is chock-full of bookish things to do, if you know where to go. In a region this sprawling, you’re not likely to simply stumble upon these places, so whether you’re just visiting, or reside on this U.S. west coast wedge, use this list of SoCal literary landmarks as a map to the literature that thrives beside the Pacific.

Book Review

Human Hubris Dictates ‘The Soul of an Octopus’

10/01/201802/24/2023
by Hannah Huff

A BOOK REVIEW OF SY MONTGOMERY’S NONFICTION TEXT – THE SOUL OF AN OCTOPUS: A SURPRISING EXPLORATION INTO THE WONDER OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Perhaps it’s because I just read Ill Nature, with its incisive critiques of humanity’s handling of animals, from scientists in the name of research, to zookeepers in the name of conservation. Or maybe it’s because my friends are cephalopod aficionados who don’t need to cosset octopuses in an aquarium to recognize their significance as living creatures. But for being a book entitled The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness, Sy Montgomery’s 2015 text seems awfully fixated on oblivious humans, while offering only a surface-level, diluted view of the souls the title purports to give prominence to.