'Sanctuary' is a reminder of just how singular an artist Puryear is. It's a serious work of contemporary art that seems to have fallen out of a fairy tale-not the monophonic Disney kind but the capricious, found-object kind collected by the Brothers Grimm, in which the moral is oblique, anything can come to life, and nobody leaves unscathed. Born in 1941, Puryear came of age at a time when sculpture was flexing its muscle through intimidating scale, conceptual rigor, and protractor-perfect geometries.
Lauren Groff: If you want to write something that's going to affect people emotionally, you have to do it emotionally. Nick White: And it has to cost you more than the time you're spending writing. It pushes me to my emotional and intellectual capabilities. I feel like when something is working it is because all cylinders are firing, and I am working at the very bleeding edge of what I am capable of.
In class, I shared a set of drafts of a poem that appeared in my most recent collection. One by one, I projected versions of the poem onto a screen. I drew attention to the red ink slashing through unwanted words. I pointed out how I added, struck, added, struck and then re-added a comma. I boasted about my careful use of my favorite punctuation mark-the delightfully overlong em dash.
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