Wednesday, February 21, 2007
Write toward. I ran across an introduction I wrote for last year's guest writer, and this portion still had some urgency for me:
His first book, The Theory and Practice of Mangoes, speaks in its opening lines of the luxury of distance that many Americans gladly accept as a birthright. "You're overly intellectual about things like cholera," the poet says to himself at the start of this collection of poems that returns, bravely, over and over again, to the problem of being a North American in India, and by the final poem a lesser poet might have thought that he had found a resolution. Instead, as the leper girl reaches over and touches the pant leg of the poet and begs for any kind of aid, a reader sees that the poet can't write off or write up or write over this essential encounter, and my own reading of the final page of the book is that he has chosen to write toward it, to grapple with experience with all the lyrical and spiritual energy he can muster, to see whether he can only connect. I admire his project in that first book very much, and I look forward to learning where the project, the journey, has taken him over the last couple of years. So I am pleased to introduce to you George Kalamaras. [0 & P]
His first book, The Theory and Practice of Mangoes, speaks in its opening lines of the luxury of distance that many Americans gladly accept as a birthright. "You're overly intellectual about things like cholera," the poet says to himself at the start of this collection of poems that returns, bravely, over and over again, to the problem of being a North American in India, and by the final poem a lesser poet might have thought that he had found a resolution. Instead, as the leper girl reaches over and touches the pant leg of the poet and begs for any kind of aid, a reader sees that the poet can't write off or write up or write over this essential encounter, and my own reading of the final page of the book is that he has chosen to write toward it, to grapple with experience with all the lyrical and spiritual energy he can muster, to see whether he can only connect. I admire his project in that first book very much, and I look forward to learning where the project, the journey, has taken him over the last couple of years. So I am pleased to introduce to you George Kalamaras. [0 & P]
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