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.
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
Revisionist Poetry – “The Locksmith’s Lamp” – Grand Displays of Imagination, v.2
In the basement’s single bulb—olive light—He oils a stubborn canvas till it hums;A moth keeps time against the lampshade’s white,His brush translates the hush of absent drums. He paints a woman who will never leave,A mouth half-open, caught between a song;The floorboards keep each night’s small, private grieve,A stack of postcards—unsent proofs of wrong. Impostor … Continue reading Revisionist Poetry – “The Locksmith’s Lamp” – Grand Displays of Imagination, v.2
Revisionist Poetry – “Hymn of the Heap” – Beautiful Detritus, v.4 (Dylanesque)
Winter loosens its grip on the gate,lets the snow slide off like a bad alibi.The ground coughs up its old confessions—knotted string, a split glove, last year’s lie. There’s a tangle of jute in the belly of the bed,leaf bones rattling their thin, dry prayer,a rusted hook humming to the worms,like it still remembers holding … Continue reading Revisionist Poetry – “Hymn of the Heap” – Beautiful Detritus, v.4 (Dylanesque)
Revisionist Poetry – “The Garden’s Leftovers” – Beautiful Detritus, v.3 (a touch more wabi-sabi)
When thaw begins, the garden exhales—thin ice lifting from the hollow of the beds.Beneath: torn burlap, rust-kissed wire, one pale glovegone to the soft apprenticeship of soil. These are the beautiful terms of loss:string looped like an old promise, leaf veins like maps.Frost has taught everything how to fracture well.Time stitches rag to root; the … Continue reading Revisionist Poetry – “The Garden’s Leftovers” – Beautiful Detritus, v.3 (a touch more wabi-sabi)
Revisionist Poetry – “Spring in Rags” – Beautiful Detritus, v.2
At winter’s end the thaw unfurls—snow sighs away, exposing mud:brown earth, matted jute, a coil of string,a seed packet emptied of its promise. The gardener’s tools—glove, snapped stake—lie like punctuation across the beds.Rain knits the ravelled twine to root;wind braids leaves into a new script. What was discarded reads as pattern:stalks turned brushstroke, burlap turned … Continue reading Revisionist Poetry – “Spring in Rags” – Beautiful Detritus, v.2
Revisionist Poetry – “Root-Voices” – Deep Roots, v.4
They came with metal mouths that sang.The trees folded like paper prayers.We waited until the machines slept. Hole-Wood smells of saw and salt.We call the stumps throatstones.We press our ears and the earth answers. deep voice:— we were columns, we held the sky.— we swallowed rain like coins.— we remember the names of every shadow. … Continue reading Revisionist Poetry – “Root-Voices” – Deep Roots, v.4
The New Renaissance Mindset 