Poetry
A Thing Defined
Contributor
Craig Morgan TeicherCraig Morgan Teicher is the author of four books, including The Trembling Answers: Poems (BOA Editions, April) and the editor of Once and For All: The Best of Delmore Schwartz (New Directions). He lives in New Jersey with his wife and kids.
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This Strange Thing, the Word*
By Trinh T. Minh-haNOV 2021 | Critics Page
It pains you terribly to hear it. The word. It was dropped casually, as if of no importance. The moment it hit your ears, your heart got stoned. The immediate reaction was a full silence. It weighed on you as you turned mute. You wanted to throw it out, back to where it came from, but to no avail. All you could hear yourself uttering were some rasping throat sounds.
Josephine Pryde: The Vibrating Slab and Club Med
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Pryde appears apathetic towards distinctions between the natural and the manmade. She seizes moments of physical flux where material substrates emerge in the process of deformation and wear, whether it be wind whipping a mountain-face or water distorting a tablet screen. Apprehension of what a thing is emerges in the instant it falls apart.
Despite its Bumpy History, Merrily We Roll Along Glides Back to New York
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The first time I saw Merrily was at Fair Lawn High School in New Jersey in 2008; Stephen Sondheim apparently attended a performance and spoke to the cast. I remember being amazed by the score, confused by the story, but moved by the ending—in that amateur production’s final gesture, as the chorus refrains “me and you” during “Our Time,” antihero Franklin Shepard’s piano comes back on stage and he, alone, faces it. Maria Friedman’s production, now sold out at New York Theatre Workshop, concludes with a similar visual, and an idea clicked: music is the you to Franklin’s me, the thing he cares most about and what he has to lose when the people who make him sing fade away, dimming like distant stars.
Double Slit
By Fawn KriegerSEPT 2022 | Critics Page
In Quantum mechanics, the Double Slit is the name of an experiment that reveals the simultaneous nature of energy and matter, as well as the imprint consciousness has on our material world. Is the body a wave or a thing, an event or a subject? Do we move in stops and starts or is our lens too small to see the flow? Maybe we are always in simultaneous states of pause and action, if we could only see energy and matter at once.
