When the authentic gesture is negative
Incomplete Thinking about Coincidental Readings: Noftle, Kelli Anne. I Was There for your Somniloquy (Omnidawn 2012). Tayler, Christopher. "A Great Consolation: The Postwar Unmaking of Samuel Beckett." Harper's May, 2012. I recently read Kelli Anne Noftle's debut collection, I Was There for your Somniloquy , and found it challenging, beautiful, substantial--excellent reading. It deserves a full review, and I have made some notes toward one. Here, though, I want to sort out an individual, idiosyncratic moment of reading that connected me to an idea of absence or negation in art: what this blog is mainly about. While reading the book's final poem, “Hypnagogic is a Sound,” I had an experience of recognition. An image sequence near the end of the poem—a sequence related to a childhood narrative that grounds the poem’s lyric explorations—str...