Planet Claire

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Jeff Porter. Planet Claire

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Michael Kreiser

JEFF PORTER is the author of Lost Sound: The Forgotten Art of Radio Storytelling, the memoir Oppenheimer Is Watching Me, and coeditor of Understanding the Essay. His essays and articles have appeared in several magazines and literary reviews, including the Antioch Review, Northwest Review, Shenandoah, Missouri Review, Hotel Amerika, Wilson Quarterly, Contemporary Literature, and the Seneca Review. He loves cameras, dogs, and guitars—though not in that order. He lives in Iowa City and teaches English at the University of Iowa.

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I return home for the night feeling utterly lost. I lie down with your book. It’s not Lydgate that draws me to this work but your mindful way of writing. You did your best to confer on me, Mr. Digressio, some of your magic. Every once in a while I will surprise myself with a flash of clarity, thanks to you. I hope I’m not embarrassing you, by the way. I know how self-conscious you are. This book was not a career move. You were already an accomplished medievalist with a national reputation. You could have easily switched gears and written a book about noise and hearing, as you planned. I was all for that. It’s time for a fun book, I said. No more footnotes. Write a memoir about your ears—your deafness is marketable. Disability studies are big. You are a creative person.

You were tempted, maybe a little, but you wanted to see your commitments through. You had published an edition of Lydgate’s mummings a few years ago, and so it made sense to complete the project by reclaiming the guy, chiefly regarded as a major fifteenth-century poet, for early modern drama. That would mean rethinking medieval drama history and challenging the priority of poetry in canon building, but that made the project even more essential. Such big ambitions.

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