The Elephant of Silence: Essays on Poetics and Cinema

By: John Wall Barger

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Synopsis: “A poem is an act of faith because the poet believes in it,” contends John Wall Barger in The Elephant of Silence, a collection of essays exploring forms of knowing (and not knowing) that awaken a poetic mind. By considering poetry, film, and the intersections among aesthetic moments and our lives, Barger illuminates the foundations of poetic craft but also probes how to be alive, creative, and open in the world. Each piece investigates unanswerable questions and indefinable words: Lorca’s duende, Nabokov’s poshlost, Bashō’s underglimmer, Huizinga’s ludic, Tarkovsky’s Zona. Influenced by poets such as Glück and Ruefle, and filmmakers such as Kubrick and Lynch, Barger writes—first always sharing his own personal life stories—on the nature of perception, experience, and the human mind. With lyric eloquence and disarming candor, The Elephant of Silence tackles how to live an imaginative life, how to gravitate toward the silence from which art comes, and how the mystical is also the everyday.

Book Quality:: Publisher Quality
ISBN-13:: 9780807182062
Related ISBNs:: 9780807181577, 9780807182079
Publisher:: LSU Press
Date of Addition:: 01/31/24
Copyrighted By:: John Wall Barger
Adult content:: No
Language:: English
Has Image Descriptions:: No
Categories:: History, Entertainment, Nonfiction, Poetry, Art and Architecture, Literature and Fiction, Language Arts
Submitted By:: Bookshare Staff
Usage Restrictions:: This is a copyrighted book.