Monthly Roundup(s) X: Autumnal Redemption Arc

News, news, news!

Welcome back to the monthly roundup(s) for September, October, and most of November at Silver Door, where perusal-worthy articles and poetry related happenings from Substack and beyond are highlighted alongside recent SD news and posts.

Silver Door was graced with an excellent debut poem from poet

J. Tullius

, as well as return performances from crowd favorites Mary Angela Douglas and Sam Downey-Higgins.

Listen, readers can be forgiven for not believing what I’m about to say, but after a year and a half of publishing Silver Door in a more or less slapdash manner, I think I have a plan. Going forward, most weekly prose pieces will be quite short, and about half of them will that I put out will be paid only. This will allow me to focus on what I like to write, which is long form essays that help me process what I’m most interested in at the time. If you’ve been with me from the beginning or gone through the archive you’ll know that this endeavor was launched with the essay Human Conversion in the Digital Age. People seemed to have enjoyed that piece despite comments about it’s length and although after rereading it I am not entirely satisfied it certainly was a jumping off point for this publication and for future discussion that have borne fruit.

My thinking at the moment is that some of the short pieces can serve as a means of workshopping some of the ideas for the longer pieces, which I hope to put out every other month or so. As a father of two very young boys and another on the way this is the best way I see moving forward to make all this a sustainable venture.

I’m ashamed at how poorly I’ve kept up with my correspondences of late and I’m looking to rectify that. If you haven’t heard back from me, I apologize and will be in touch soon.

Still, I am chugging along on my next long form piece, tentatively and perhaps ridiculously titled: It’s pretty, but is it Art?: Gender, Right Wing Theater Kids, and Normicide in the Urban-Rural Divide.

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Around The Web

Nik Hoffmann

: A Diagnosis of Contemporary Poetry—Hoffman continues to put out thoughtful criticism alongside his poems. It’s common sense, back-to-basics stuff but that is what’s needed at present. Subtitled: Notes on the Lack of Poetic Dynamism.

In a section titled Clichéd Privatism, he writes:

If a poem leans too far into public meaning, it becomes cliché. If a poem leans too far towards private meaning, it becomes an obscurity. Frankly, little more needs to said. Poets seem not to acknowledge or care that a poem can be a public facing artifact. As with my previous arguments, I will once again assert that interplay has been lost—the interplay between public and private language. Poets would do well to take advantage of this dynamic in their poetry.

&

Cormac Jones

: Turning to the octave—Jones is the kind of writer that can make any subject interesting.

The first line from this piece: “I’ve figured out the shape of U.S. history.” And a little later on:

The octave shape, found in Scripture and put to plentiful liturgical use both in Temple and in Church, also has its secular uses. The Judeo-Christian tradition certainly doesn’t hold a monopoly on the heptatonic musical scale, a seven-note sequence that repeats on octave intervals. Both Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, 24 books each, I perceive as triads of octaves. Patterns found in nature such as the lunar cycle or the shape of our teeth have a basis in octave units. The history of the United States of America may very well be proceeding according to this pattern. It in fact may very well be dovetailing Russian history with this shape, if in an accelerated time frame.

All of which is to say, my long detour into the polarization of the passions, institutionalized in American politics, has led me back to where I began, the need to set forth what the octave is and how it works.

Always enjoyable.

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Silver Door Posts

By Nik Hoffman:

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Poems on Silver Door

A Child Considers His Senescene

Written by Sam Downey-Higgins

Winter sees a fall of men by road or sleeping river

Too Many Starving Birds

Imitation of Graves

Written by Mary Angela Douglas

For That Which Falls Beside The Wayside

Strawberry Hill

The Best Poems

Long Paths of Ink

By J. Tullius

At the Brink

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Video of the Month

Are you familiar with the philosopher Friedrich Schelling?