The End

by Aditi Machado

Literary Nonfiction. Poet, translator, and educator Aditi Machado's THE END is an essay about the ends of poems and the ends of time. Through close readings of a range of poets and thinkers (including Rainer Maria Rilke, Emily Dickinson, and Lyn Hejinian), an interrogation of the received aesthetics of US writing workshops, and reflections on her own poetic practice, Machado examines notions of epiphany, closure, excess, and economy.

Genres: Essays, Poetry

45 pages, Chapbook

Published January 1, 2020

Reviews

[eleanor · Rating 5 out of 5]

fantastic little essay about reading & writing poetry. why do we always want poetry to be neat & tidy? i especially loved her portrayal of the Reader as Consumer:

"how to understand these anxieties over Too Muchness in poetry? have they to do with The Reader being required to do too much work (deciphering) for too little profit? or is it that The Poet is giving away too much for free?"

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

The End begins with the end of Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo” (“You must change your life”) to explore epiphanies (literature’s “money shot”), understanding and teaching poetry, the economy (literal and metaphoric) of poetics, and what it means for a poem to end. Clear, persuasive, and engaging, this essay—implicitly on ethics—will appeal to those who read, think about, teach, and/or write poetry.

[K. Iver · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful meditation on poetry that can resist declarative and closed epiphany:

“But if I remove from epiphany the expectation it offer closure, I begin to conceive of it, simply as an aspect of the procedures of language. A kind of thickening up, a tendency toward music or noise, an opening out. In that moment, if feels like something is being made manifest—a corporeal revelation of some kind of (not capital T) truth. It’s the ‘coming suddenly into view’ of an elucidation. And as with coming into view of, say, a feature of the landscape when one is driving toward it, past it, ahead of it, one might move toward and away from the epiphany without it necessarily becoming the fact of the poem. The thing for which you remember it, if you remember it at all.”

[Brainard · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful book and thought provoking, on poetry and craft and more, my favorite line from the author - “Here’s me desperately not wanting to teach how to give good end.”