Jonathan, I feel, indulges that Rhina P. Espaillat poem far more than it deserves. Even granted that the sonnet is apparently part of a longer cycle, which I haven’t read, and which looks like it has a larger thematic focus on storytelling in the abstract, thus potentially relieving the individual poem somewhat of the accusation that the story it tells isn’t interesting in itself, there’s just no excusing the arthritic prosody and trite phrasing, which are clearly not self-consciously intended. Read more »

In response to Ron’s Test of Poetry, and his discussion of “the question of naming & context, of anonymity & content”:

This exercise reminds me of the passage in Lacan’s Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: Read more »

The emotive function (set toward the addresser), as Jakobson describes it, could be seen as the least intrinsically “linguistic” of all the linguistic functions. Read more »

What follows began as a response in Ron’s Squawkbox comment window, but it started getting too long so I transplanted it. Read more »