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Friday, February 27, 2026

For Cairo Sweet: Pristine

Filed under: General — Tags: Derived Canons — m759 @ 10:31 am

On author Henry Miller —

"Everything registers with pristine clearness."

— Lawrence Durell in Alexandria, 1945

From a search in this journal for "Pristine" —

I prefer this to the taxi driver's version
in "Leaving Las Vegas" —

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Tuesday, September 9, 2025

For Cairo Sweet: Yale Review on Abstractions and Epiphanies

Filed under: General — Tags: Art Space — m759 @ 3:42 pm

Excerpt —

"But the first thing I felt when rereading Oliver’s work was frustration. Though almost uniformly straightforward and sincere, her poetry is vastly uneven in quality, demonstrating little thematic or stylistic growth over the long arc of her career. In the dullest poems, her trademark simplicity can seem like the result of lazy writing, bloated with abstractions that hurry the reader toward unearned epiphany. It wasn’t just that these poems didn’t require all my hard-won hermeneutic tools to be understood; it was that they seemed to actively thwart them, resisting my scalpel like polished stones." — Maggie Millner

Tired of Maggie's farm?

Try Adrienne Rich on stonecutting —

Now, you intelligence
So late dredged up from dark
Upon whose smoky walls
Bison took fumbling form
Or flint was edged on flint–
Now, careful arriviste,
Delineate at will
Incisions in the ice.

Be serious, because
The stone may have contempt
For too-familiar hands,
And because all you do
Loses or gains by this:
Respect the adversary,
Meet it with tools refined,
And thereby set your price.

— From the Adrienne Rich poem
"The Diamond Cutters." (1955)

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