NORMIE CREEP IN THE
SACRED GROVE

NORMIE CREEP IN THE SACRED GROVE is an occasional poetry reading series which takes place at Dave’s Fox Head Tavern in Iowa City, Iowa. 

Hosted by Alicia Wright, each reading features a combination of visiting regionally and nationally-recognized poets alongside local and Iowa Writers’ Workshop graduate student poets, usually three but no more than four readers at a time, each of whom receives a fulsome introduction.

Upcoming Readings—

11/16/24: ...Scout Faller, Nicholas Gulig, Cody-Rose Clevidence

Previous Readings

11/2/24: Jo Wallace, Alyssa Perry, Kai Ihns, Aditi Machado
10/12/24: Pearl Silverman, Kelly Krumrie, Vincent James, and MC Hyland
9/7/24: Zubair Siddiqui, Joshua Thermidor, Logan Fry

4/6/24: Maxime Garcia Diaz, Joi Haskins, Ryan Skrabalak, Elizabeth Willis
9/28/23: Constant Williams, Dabin Jeong, Elaine Kahn

9/2/23: Helene Achanzar, Sadia Hassan, and Lisa Low in partnership with Kundiman Midwest
5/11/23: Alicia Mountain, Olivia Sio Tse, Caylin Capra Thomas

5/2/23: Emily Bark Brown, Alessandra Allen, Tahjia Brantley

Introducers have included Olivia Sio Tse, Bader Al-Awadhi, Hannah Piette, Delilah Silberman, Brian Orozco, Khushal Gujadhur, Alyssa Perry, Victoria Sanchez, Tia Fishler, Cary Stough, Devanshi Khetarpal, Rodney Dailey II, Micah Bateman, and Elim Pilet

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Theodor Adorno, “On Writing,” (1945). Translated from the German by E. F. N. Jephcott; translation copyright 1974.

51 Memento. – A first precaution for writers: in every text, every piece, every paragraph to check whether the central motif stands out clearly enough. Anyone wishing to express something is so carried away by it that he ceases to reflect on it. Too close to his intention, ‘in his thoughts’, he forgets to say what he wants to say. No improvement is too small or trivial to be worthwhile. Of a hundred alterations each may seem trifling or pedantic by itself; together they can raise the text to a new level. One should never begrudge deletions. The length of a work is irrelevant, and the fear that not enough is on paper, childish. Nothing should be thought worthy to exist simply because it exists, has been written down. When several sentences seem like variations on the same idea, they often only represent different attempts to grasp something the author has not yet mastered. Then the best formulation should be chosen and developed further. It is part of the technique of writing to be able to discard ideas, even fertile ones, if the construction demands it. Their richness and vigour will benefit others at present repressed. Just as, at table, one ought not eat the last crumbs, drink the lees. Otherwise, one is suspected of poverty. The desire to avoid clichés should not, on pain of falling into vulgar coquetry, be confined to single words. The great French prose of the nineteenth century was particularly sensitive to such vulgarity. A word is seldom banal on its own: in music too the single note is immune to triteness. The most abominable clichés are combinations of words, such as Karl Kraus skewered for inspection: utterly and completely, for better or for worse, implemented and effected. For in them the brackish stream of stale language swills aimlessly, instead of being dammed up, thrown into relief, by the precision of the writer’s expressions. This applies not only to combinations of words, but to the construction of whole forms. If a dialectician, for example, marked the turning-point of his advancing ideas by starting with a ‘But’ at each caesura, the literary scheme would give the lie to the unschematic intention of his thought. The thicket is no sacred grove. There is a duty to clarify all difficulties that result merely from esoteric complacency. Between the desire for a compact style adequate to the depth of its subject matter, and the temptation to recondite and pretentious slovenliness, there is no obvious distinction: suspicious probing is always salutary. Precisely the writer most unwilling to make concessions to drab common sense must guard against draping ideas, in themselves banal, in the appurtenances of style. Locke’s platitudes are no justification for Hamann’s obscurities. Should the finished text, no matter of what length, arouse even the slightest misgivings, these should be taken inordinately seriously, to a degree out of all proportion to their apparent importance. Affective involvement in the text, and vanity, tend to diminish all scruples. What is let pass as a minute doubt may indicate the objective worthlessness of the whole. The Echternach dancing procession is not the march of the World Spirit;1 limitation and reservation are no way to represent the dialectic. Rather, the dialectic advances by way of extremes, driving thoughts with the utmost consequentiality to the point where they turn back on themselves, instead of qualifying them. The prudence that restrains us from venturing too far ahead in a sentence, is usually only an agent of social control, and so of stupefaction. Scepticism is called for in the face of the frequently raised objection that a text, a formulation, are ‘too beautiful’. Respect for the matter expressed, or even for suffering, can easily rationalize mere resentment against a writer unable to bear the traces, in the reified form of language, of the degradation inflicted on humanity. The dream of an existence without shame, which the passion for language clings to even though forbidden to depict it as content, is to be maliciously strangled. The writer ought not acknowledge any distinction between beautiful and adequate expression. He should neither suppose such a distinction in the solicitous mind of the critic, nor tolerate it in his own. If he succeeds in saying entirely what he means, it is beautiful. Beauty of expression for its own sake is not at all ‘too beautiful’, but ornamental, arty-crafty, ugly. But he who, on the pretext of unselfishly serving only the matter at hand, neglects purity of expression, always betrays the matter as well. Properly written texts are like spiders’ webs: tight, concentric, transparent, well-spun and firm. They draw into themselves all the creatures of the air. Metaphors flitting hastily through them become their nourishing prey. Subject matter comes winging towards them. The soundness of a conception can be judged by whether it causes one quotation to summon another. Where thought has opened up one cell of reality, it should, without violence by the subject, penetrate the next. It proves its relation to the object as soon as other objects crystallize around it. In the light it casts on its chosen substance, others begin to glow. In his text, the writer sets up house. Just as he trundles papers, books, pencils, documents untidily from room to room, he creates the same disorder in his thoughts. They become pieces of furniture that he sinks into, content or irritable. He strokes them affectionately, wears them out, mixes them up, re-arranges, ruins them. For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live. In it he inevitably produces, as his family once did, refuse and lumber. But now he lacks a store-room, and it is hard in any case to part from left-overs. So he pushes them along in front of him, in danger finally of filling his pages with them. The demand that one harden oneself against self-pity implies the technical necessity to counter any slackening of intellectual tension with the utmost alertness, and to eliminate anything that has begun to encrust the work or to drift along idly, which may at an earlier stage have served, as gossip, to generate the warm atmosphere conducive to growth, but is now left behind, flat and stale. In the end, the writer is not even allowed to live in his writing. 1. Echternach is a town in Luxemburg, whose dance procession at Whitsun advances in a movement of three steps forward, and two steps backward.