The Press has published “The Casual Presence of Borders,” a book of poetry from longtime faculty member Mackie J.V. Blanton. Blanton spent 25 years at the as an English professor and associate dean of student life before retiring in 2005.
A celebration of the release of the book will take place at Octavia Books, 513 Octavia St. in New Orleans, on Wednesday, Oct. 11 from 6-7:30 p.m.
Borders exist in and are occupied by space and time ritualized by seen and unseen, known and unknown, human struggles. In “The Casual Presence of Borders,” Blanton captures borders present around denizens or friends gathered at bars or over coffee, over new births, over silence and meals; at nearby places of worship or warfare or death; or unvisited planets or islands of our knowledge or imagination; or the sensed presence of the cells and arteries of the human body; and human beings noticed in easy chairs, in backyards across fences, or caught crossing in woods, swamps, bridges.
Blanton is driven by two concepts: the protection of fiction inhabiting poems and a guiding principle of a post-contemporary sensibility that slips through and away from modernism and postmodernism to grasp elsewhere a possible unfamiliar, hardly quite there yet, future.
Niyi Osundare, emeritus English professor and renowned poet and essayist, calls Blanton “A virtuoso of word-music, word-play, and allied neologism.”
A native of New Orleans, Blanton received his Ph.D. in linguistics from the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. He has written essays on linguistics, poetics, scientific and technical discourse, Louisiana dialects, and Sufi and Hasidic sacred languages. His current research in critical theory linguistics analyzes the nature and structure of thought as a scripture suggested by subtle, often subconscious thought experiments or contemplative thinking underlying the meditative practice of language in scientific discourse and literary expression.
