In the story “The Sea Change,” the man and his choice of the words “vices” and “virtue” to describe the woman he is affected me the strongest. All three of the short stories feature characters and their struggle with the concept of vice and virtues. “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” feature a troubled young man who is unable to… Read more →
A couple of summers ago, I attended a small gallery done by a German publishing company that specialized in photo books and book binding called Steidl Books. After an hour long displays of books and realizing font experts were an actual thing, I realized that the way a book is set up is not as simple or slapdash as… Read more →
The House comes to symbolize a million things at once. One of which is the speculation that the internal structure of the House fluctuates and changes based on the person and his experience of the House: a kind of architectural Rorschach Test, so to speak. This is a clear parallel between the House of Leaves and the House. From page 246 to 252,… Read more →
As this was the second of the Duffy’s poems that I examined at the MARBL, I couldn’t help but compare the drafts and the writing process of “Eurydice” with “TELEGRAMS.” The strongest impression that Duffy’s notebooks gave me was the amount of struggle she had with writing beyond the first stanza. The earliest draft is marked as “21st March 1996.”… Read more →
The first difference I picked up between the final and earlier drafts of the poem “TELEGRAMS” is the level of emotion. In the second draft, Duffy includes moments like “YES YES YES YES YES” (Ln. 13) or “NO. NO. NO. NO. GET IT THROUGH YOUR THICK SKULL” (Ln. 22) Both of these lines have been omitted in the later drafts of… Read more →
(An example of Russian Futurist Poetry) As someone who writes poetry of his own and hates the feeling of stagnation within my works, Carol Ann Duffy was a challenging read. Especially towards the latter half of her poems, the overbearing question was: What separates experimenting from gimmicks? Is it how smoothly it works into the poem? How seamlessly… Read more →
The novel takes place after World War I. The War has ended, or perhaps more accurately, shifted. It is important to note that almost every single character that our troubled heroine introduces us during the first third of the book suffers from some kind of conflict. The conflict is not against another figure, country, or nature. The War has instead… Read more →