olivia cronk

25 Points: Susan Sontag’s “Against Interpretation”

"The Silence" (still), directed by Ingmar Bergman (1963)

“The Silence” (still), directed by Ingmar Bergman (1963)

[Update: I posted a follow-up to this post, here.]

1.

Susan Sontag’s seminal mid-60s essay has come up several times at this site. I’ve been busy rereading it since Xmas, and want to take this chance to set down some thoughts regarding it.

2.

Obviously, whatever interpretation is, Sontag seems against it.

3.

What, then, does Sontag mean by “interpretation”? Does she mean any and all interpretation, as my fellow contributor Chris Higgs recently argued? Or something else, something more specific?

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Vicarious MFA / 79 Comments
March 18th, 2013 / 8:01 am

3 New from Action Books: Burning City, Cronk, Hyesoon

If you don’t own every title Action Books puts out, I’d say you’re slipping. Here are three new just released units for that library of teeth:

Burning City: Poems of Metropolitan Modernity ed. by Jed Rasula & Tim Conley [like 400 pp full of insane shit discoveries]

Skin Horse by Olivia Cronk [I’ve already read this twice, it’s wow]

All the Garbage of the World, Unite! by Kim Hyesoon, translated by Don Mee Choi [Which after Hyesoon’s first book, Mommy Must Be A Mountain of Feathers, also from Action, I’m ready to be killed again]

Eat!!!!!!!!!!!!

Presses / 5 Comments
March 6th, 2012 / 3:20 pm

If poetics does not ask the reader to re-negotiate how one reads, if it does not attempt to cast new light on all that came before it, then why bother? Outmoded “schools” of poetry must be transcended so that we might effectively evaluate what does and what does not alter reality and why and how.

“Failures of the Imagination” by Olivia Cronk

Excerpts / 12 Comments
November 2nd, 2009 / 11:38 pm