Jana Remy
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Jana Remy

  • Writing
    • Disability
    • Making History
    • Digital Humanities
      • dayofDH
    • Canoeing
    • Creative Nonfiction & Essays
    • Feminism
    • Bibliographies
      • Pacific Worlds Bibliography
    • Social Media
      • Mentions/Links
  • Scholarship
    • Awards/Fellowships
    • Conferences & Invited Talks
    • Collaboration
    • Workshops
    • Conference Planning
    • Technical Skills
  • Teaching
    • Blogposts About Teaching
Daily Archives

June 23, 2011

guilty pleasures…
lovesongs/poetrythings I like

guilty pleasures…

ranunculus
One of my favorite guilty pleasures is perusing the poetry and interviews in The Paris Review.  I don’t remember how or why I began reading it, but once I did I was hooked.  Recently I was going through some poetry in the online archives and came across this interview with writer Shirley Hazzard.  I especially enjoy what she says about poetry:

Poetry has been the longest pleasure of my life. It literally and figuratively saved my life, and enabled me to live inwardly. I do not know how people manage without it…

Vladimir Nabokov told his American students that they must saturate themselves in the poetry of their language, poetry in English, in order to develop the ear. This seems to me the most valuable advice one could give to readers or writers. Of course, he did not mean that this should be done with a “purpose” in mind, as if to exploit the power and beauty of great art. Accessibility to expressive language will not come that way. It is an act of love, with implicit humility, and must develop itself. So much of this is intuitive, and intuition itself must be developed from an early age if it is not to languish. Our era of interpretations and explanations and the piling up of convoluted lingo in the academic world–the self-gratification of many a “close reading,” the psycho-sociological overlaying and, often, undermining that commentators apply to works of genius–has been inimical to the nurturing of intuitive affinity and understanding. Much of that arises, I think, from a modern fear of immediacy and of the loss of the illusion of control. Housman’s reference to the hairs rising at the back of one’s neck as one reads a poem remains a test of quality. Such response is individual and cannot merely be generalized, dismantled, controlled.

I love that feeling of “the hairs rising at the back of one’s neck” from poetry.  I know that sensation all too well.  And it’s what keeps me coming back for more.

June 23, 2011
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This is the Place (or, my return to the LDS church)
LDS

This is the Place (or, my return to the LDS church)

IMG_4128

This weekend I attended the LDS church while on a visit to Utah. It was my first time attending a Sacrament Meeting in well over five years. It was my first time taking the sacrament (communion) in much longer than that (because even long before I stopped attending the Mormon church, I couldn’t stomach the symbols of that ordinance). It wasn’t an earth-shaking experience in any way. In fact, it was just the opposite. The hymns were familiar and I sang them with some gusto (much to the chagrin of my seatmates, I’m sure–I do not have a pretty voice). Shaking the Bishop’s hand and meeting the local saints was endearing. I felt no friction in any of those experiences.

That said, I have no intention of returning to activity in the LDS church. But it was nice to know that I could attend and it could be a benign, rather than a frustrating experience. Perhaps that means that I am finally healing from the wounds incurred by my natal faith, and am comfortable with where I’m at now in my life.

June 23, 2011
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About Me

About Me

Hi there friend, and welcome to my blog. I started writing on the internet two decades ago. Since then I've started and finished a PhD program, left the Mormon church and became a Quaker, got divorced, remarried, found full-time work in academia, took up rock climbing and outrigger canoeing, and traveled across the globe (China! Belgium! Italy! Chicago! Montana! Portland! Gettysburg! and oh-so-many points in-between). This blog is eclectic and random--it has poetry and cooking and books. And cats. And flowers. And the ocean (my ocean). But in that sense it's a good reflection of me and my wide-ranging, far-reaching, magpie curiosity.

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