Robert Hardgrave — The Monarch Review

The Way Thought Moves

Wednesday, April 11, 2012 15:59 — 1 Comment

I recently had a conversation with the poet Caleb Thompson about the difficulty of “following a thought,” of moving logically from a preposition to a conclusion. He had been reading quite a few essays and was perhaps feeling awed by the talent these writers possessed of cutting through the static of daily “thought.” I replied that good essays are not an accurate record of a mind in motion—the literary equivalent of Muybridge’s photographs might be the Surrealists’ practice of automatic writing—the mind works through tangents, association, gaps, false memory, distraction. An essay that is well-structured, revelatory, and dense with meaning […]