Joe Weil

Meditation on Marianne Moore

by Joe Weil Poetry and Poetics
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She scares me the way Cordelia scares me–by dint of her absolute integrity.

Writing Without an Idea

by Joe Weil Poetry and Poetics
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I don’t usually have an idea in mind when I begin to write.

Poems and Their Ideas

by Joe Weil Poetry and Poetics
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An idea for a poem is always a competing poem.

Meditation on Apollinaire

by Joe Weil Memoir
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I must describe the physical sensation this poem had on me. It was a hot and humid day, and the house was full of fans whirring, and flies buzzing, and no one was home.

Literary Movements: Insider as Outsider and Token Renegade

by Joe Weil Academia
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When gaining a foothold among the establishment, it is important the so called “outsiders” or mavericks have a figure fully anchored within the establishment who can be “acceptable.”

Gatekeepers of Literary Greatness: On Piety

by Joe Weil Aesthetics
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In the full complexity of human constructs piety is the rhetoric of conflicting and supposedly coherent values.

Gatekeepers of Literary Greatness: Some Definitions and a Parable about Chickens

by Joe Weil Academia
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The chickens are purifying their system, purging it of corruption. Meanwhile, the chickens who willfully refuse to answer the bell are seen as impious, as negative, as renegades.

Gatekeepers of Literary Greatness

by Joe Weil Academia
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The more things same, the more they same the change.
Things change by staying the same.
Things stay the same by changing.

“Fractured at a Touch:” More on Abstract and Concrete

by Joe Weil Language
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We are always towards an abstraction, one way or the other, but the use of detail, how we emphasize or mute, or play with an image is at the heart of contemporary poetics.

A Thing with Feathers: Concrete and Abstract

by Joe Weil Poetry and Poetics
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We have seven hues, a silver gyre, seven swords of vision, and a prophet’s flaming tyre. Beats me as to what Campbell means, but almost all lyrical poems contain such moments of high gibberish.

It’s Getting On Towards Winter: Reflections on Joe Salerno and Some Friends

by Joe Weil Poetry and Poetics
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I try to tell my students that professionalism can be murderous. It can not offer what poetry truly has to give. It can succeed at the level of men, but it can not fail at the level of the truly profound and meaningful pact we make with love, beyond, and perhaps, because of our futility.

Derangement: Breton and Metaphor

by Joe Weil Language
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All metaphors are, eventually, false, inaccurate, distortians of reality. Reality itself is a distortion. Frost–the conservative–said as much.

Metaphor as Foundation of Consciousness

by Joe Weil Language
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Metaphors are committed to falsehood and inexactness for the sake of a possibility more vital than precision.

How to Teach Writing to Beginners (Towards a Different Kind of Workshop, Part IV)

by Joe Weil Poetry and Poetics
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Russian novelists exhausted every eye color in the 19th century. Pop song writers are the only people who can make a big deal out of eyes anymore.

Jazz, Workshop, Fake books, & Misremembering

by Joe Weil Music
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By the shores of gitchee goomy, / Stood the noble Hiawatha / quoting from the other shore: / Only this and nothing more.

How to Edit Poems in a Workshop (Towards a Different Kind of Workshop, Part III)

by Joe Weil Poetry and Poetics
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Break up into groups, something they love to do now-a-days: Line/space coach, image/word choice coach, rhythm/syntax coach, and meaning/subtext coach.

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