Uncategorized | January 31, 2006

Jason Koo, newly appointed Poetry Editor of the Missouri Review, examines Bachelard’s Poetics of Space in a web-exclusive piece, “In Defense of Daydreaming: Bachelard’s Poetics of Space.”

Koo writes, “I love the title of this book, but it could easily be retitled, In Defense of Daydreaming. Bachelard argues for a certain kind of reading (one that poetry encourages) that continues on from the page, that is unhurried, relaxed, slow. He says we need to live the images on the page, let them expand in us. The poetic image creates a space that lifts off from the page, and the poetry occurs when we allow ourselves to drift into that space.”

Koo, a Ph.D. student in English and creative writing at the University of Missouri-Columbia, earned his M.F.A. from the University of Houston. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Verse, Bellingham Review, Green Mountains Review, Gulf Coast, Hanging Loose, Atlanta Review, Verse Daily, and elsewhere.