He paints as if rooms might open—doorways in oil—a skyline of possible faces leaning toward the canvas.He pins a postcard on the wall: To whoever will look first.The moth rehearses applause against the lampshade. He imagines a woman with a coat that never quite matches the weather,a child who counts brushstrokes like a secret.Strangers arrange … Continue reading Revisionist Poetry – “Painted Doorways”: On the Dream of an Audience – Grand Displays of Imagination, v.7
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Two Gentlemen of Verona by William Shakespeare
Shakespeare’s early comedy The Two Gentlemen of Verona reads—unequivocally—as the work of a dramatist still learning the ropes, and yet it contains moments of surprising moral complexity and radiant lyricism that repay careful attention. The play’s structural unevenness (rapid tonal shifts from high romance to broad slapstick, and sudden moral reversals) has long made it … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Two Gentlemen of Verona by William Shakespeare
Revisionist Poetry – “The Calendar’s Teeth”: On the Cruelty of Waiting – Grand Displays of Imagination, v.6
The calendar above the sink is a slow abrasion—dates rubbed down to the pale paper of patience.A stack of unsent postcards fans like wounded birds;the stamp-side of hope is blank. Night folds into night and leaves a note: no one came.Footsteps become a rumour on the other side of the wall.The phone sleeps face-down like … Continue reading Revisionist Poetry – “The Calendar’s Teeth”: On the Cruelty of Waiting – Grand Displays of Imagination, v.6
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Love’s Labour’s Lost by William Shakespeare
Shakespeare sets a peculiarly cerebral trap for his audience in Love’s Labour’s Lost: a courtly experiment in renunciation and study that is immediately confounded by the comic contagion of love. The play reads like a satire of pedantry and Petrarchan affectation, and its pleasures come less from plotful surprise than from the verbal inventiveness and … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Love’s Labour’s Lost by William Shakespeare
Revisionist Poetry – “Root That Knows the Stone”: On the Stubbornness of Making – Grand Displays of Imagination, v.5
The basement keeps its single bulb—olive and patient.He sands the edge of a face until the grain sings.A jar of brushes stands like sentries, stiff with dried oil;a moth rehearses the same, small circle around the light. He paints the same jaw three nights in a row,correcting an insistence that will not be quiet.Impostor comes … Continue reading Revisionist Poetry – “Root That Knows the Stone”: On the Stubbornness of Making – Grand Displays of Imagination, v.5
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Comedy of Errors by William Shakespeare
Shakespeare’s briskest and most farcical early play, The Comedy of Errors stages a combustible mixture of slapstick, classical plot-mechanics, and surprisingly tender melancholia. On its surface the play is a tight mechanical farce — two sets of identical twins, mistaken identities, beatings, arrests, and a sequence of escalating misunderstandings — but beneath that machinery Shakespeare … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Comedy of Errors by William Shakespeare
Revisionist Poetry – “Window Cracked” – Grand Displays of Imagination, v.4
Basement lamp. One face in paint.Impostor at the windowsill with cold palms.He signs the corner and leaves the window cracked—an invitation like a breath into the street.Tonight, a moth maps the lamplight; tomorrow, footsteps might follow.
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – As You Like It by William Shakespeare
As You Like It is, at once, one of Shakespeare’s most winsome comedies and one of his most philosophically porous. The play stages a collision between court and wood, artifice and simplicity, and—most memorably—between performance and identity. Its pleasures are theatrical (wit, disguise, comic reversals) but its imaginative reach is pastoral and reflective: the Forest … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – As You Like It by William Shakespeare
Revisionist Poetry – “Basement Sun” – Grand Displays of Imagination, v.3
Basement: damp breath of plaster and turpentine.A lamp pools like a small sun over a half-face—a mouth not yet finished, a jaw undecided.He works until the light invents patience. There’s a calendar pinned above the sink,the months crossed out with cigarette ash.Ideas gather in a cardboard box —old ticket stubs, a hand-scrawled compliment, a smear … Continue reading Revisionist Poetry – “Basement Sun” – Grand Displays of Imagination, v.3
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Tempest by William Shakespeare
Shakespeare's late play is at once a fairy-tale romance, a metaphysical meditation on art and illusion, and one of his most unsettling examinations of power and possession. Its small cast and island setting concentrate moral conflicts into a tight theatrical laboratory: Prospero’s rulership through books and spirits; Ariel’s airy service; Caliban’s earthy resistance; and the … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Tempest by William Shakespeare
The New Renaissance Mindset 