The dramaturg, writer, and teacher Matthew Goulish reflects on the practice of reading poetry, of reading just one poem: 'Kingfisher' by Ed Roberson. How to attend, to follow the course of poem as a waterway, to recognise in its surface tension impending drops, hidden obstacles, and disguised turns? How also and at the same time to attend to an interruption - an accidental sighting - with equal curiosity? Sincerity follows the lines of the poem inside and outside, inward and outward, drawing in a series of correspondences and correspondents, roots and sources, until reading becomes a collective endeavor; the words of Ed Roberson, Michelle Sherburne, Renee Gladman, and Lyn Hejinian are also here. As the subject of this particular poem surfaces, to catch a glimpse is not so obviously a gift: the practice of catching sight might also be injurious to another's freedom. And so we follow the trail of the poem through Smuggler's Notch.
The dramaturg, writer, and teacher Matthew Goulish reflects on the practice of reading poetry, of reading just one poem: 'Kingfisher' by Ed Roberson. How to attend, to follow the course of poem as a waterway, to recognise in its surface tension impending drops, hidden obstacles, and disguised turns? How also and at the same time to attend to an interruption - an accidental sighting - with equal curiosity? Sincerity follows the lines of the poem inside and outside, inward and outward, drawing in a series of correspondences and correspondents, roots and sources, until reading becomes a collective endeavor; the words of Ed Roberson, Michelle Sherburne, Renee Gladman, and Lyn Hejinian are also here. As the subject of this particular poem surfaces, to catch a glimpse is not so obviously a gift: the practice of catching sight might also be injurious to another's freedom. And so we follow the trail of the poem through Smuggler's Notch.
Über den Autor
Matthew Goulish co-founded Every house has a door in 2008 with Lin Hixson. He is dramaturg, writer, and sometimes performer with the company. He was a founding member of Goat Island, the Chicago-based performance group that existed from 1987 to 2009. His books include 39 microlectures - in proximity of performance (Routledge, 2001), The Brightest Thing in the World - 3 Lectures from the Institute of Failure (Green Lantern Press, 2012), Work from Memory: In Response to In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust, co-authored with Dan Beachy-Quick (Ahsahta Press, 2012) and Pitch and Revelation-Reconfigurations of Reading, Poetry, and Philosophy through the Work of Jay Wright, co-authored with Will Daddario (Punctum Books, 2022). His essays have appeared in Richard Rezac Address (University of Chicago Press, 2018), Propositions in the Making - Experiments in a Whiteheadian Laboratory (Rowman & Littlefield, 2020), and many other journals and anthologies. He teaches in the Writing Program of The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
