The Elephant of Silence: Essays on Poetics and Cinema -- John Wall Barger, Paperback

"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.

Author: John Wall Barger
Publisher: LSU Press
Published: 01/31/2024
Pages: 206
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.59lbs
Size: 8.50h x 5.50w x 0.47d
ISBN: 9780807181577

About the Author
John Wall Barger is the author of six collections of poems, including Smog Mother. An editor for Frontenac House, he lives in Vermont and lectures in the writing program at Dartmouth College.