Brian Mornar
Three American Letters (2010)
by Brian Mornar
鈥淲e receive, but how do we speak?鈥� writes Brian Mornar in Three American Letters. Part poetics, part physical manifesto and essay, Mornar takes on the lyric in the gleaming line between urban and outskirts, between speech and movement, in American poetry: 鈥溾�lways on a string between the farm and the city finds reassurance in this 鈥榖etween鈥� as a place 鈥� Here we find our bodies again as if for the first time.鈥� Mornar spins quotations into questions and eloquence in four intertwined sections that move through the fallen utopia of Hawthorne鈥檚 The Blithedale Romance, the letters of Lorine Niedecker, Ashbery鈥檚 distant rural patterns 鈥渢hrust into the urban present,鈥� as well as Benjamin鈥檚 Arcades. Moving with a fractured luminance, Mornar asks what it means to be handed down language鈥搕o read through one鈥檚 place and predecessors and to move back through such passages鈥搕hrough 鈥渢he traceable topography of the edge of the throat鈥檚 arches.鈥�
Three American Letters (2010)
by Brian Mornar
鈥淲e receive, but how do we speak?鈥� writes Brian Mornar in Three American Letters. Part poetics, part physical manifesto and essay, Mornar takes on the lyric in the gleaming line between urban and outskirts, between speech and movement, in American poetry: 鈥溾�lways on a string between the farm and the city finds reassurance in this 鈥榖etween鈥� as a place 鈥� Here we find our bodies again as if for the first time.鈥� Mornar spins quotations into questions and eloquence in four intertwined sections that move through the fallen utopia of Hawthorne鈥檚 The Blithedale Romance, the letters of Lorine Niedecker, Ashbery鈥檚 distant rural patterns 鈥渢hrust into the urban present,鈥� as well as Benjamin鈥檚 Arcades. Moving with a fractured luminance, Mornar asks what it means to be handed down language鈥搕o read through one鈥檚 place and predecessors and to move back through such passages鈥搕hrough 鈥渢he traceable topography of the edge of the throat鈥檚 arches.鈥�