no questions for richard siken at this time but i hope he learns from this post that my last ever undergraduate essay argues his poems are magical spells
@richardsiken ancient norse (and egyptian) magicians would recite spells as gods, like, "i'm odin, and i'm mending this broken bone." the speaker is odin, but the performer isn't, so we sense there's an analogy going on. that's one of my main points of comparison w/ scheherezade
@richardsiken as for how you do it--- block paragraph and associative linking for reclaiming language, allusion and text formatted to look like it's searching so the story never stops being told
@richardsiken it's a classics essay, so i'm comparing Scheherezade and Several Terrific w/ ancient spells to talk about the effect of a spell's demand/request on its form. i picked those for their differing contexts (and thus demands) + bc i can clearly argue that they're enacting something
Of course that’s your contention, you read the Andrea Long Chu Ocean Vuong takedown essay so naturally you believe this makes you an expert on contemporary poetry and autofiction. Hating Vuong will be your personality until next week, when you read Chu’s Maggie Nelson piece.