tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21999805.post2018038141034376473..comments2024-03-27T06:25:29.002-05:00Comments on Anecdotal Evidence: `Speaking Truth About the Human Word'Patrick Kurphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08436175583386298032noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21999805.post-72577433905863996432012-07-17T10:07:26.151-05:002012-07-17T10:07:26.151-05:00Not "phoenix psalms" in the last stanza,...Not "phoenix psalms" in the last stanza, but "phoenix palms"...It is a variety of palm common on the Stanford campus. Palm Drive itself (the main road into and out of the Quad) more or less points toward Mt. Diablo as you look east down two long lines of palms.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21999805.post-16036019330435609762010-08-14T10:08:50.013-05:002010-08-14T10:08:50.013-05:00Interesting you unearth such beautiful poems while...Interesting you unearth such beautiful poems while sojourning in Fredericksburg. All three speak – ever so obliquely – of battles fought, presumably lost: for the power of words to harness truth in the face of the futilities of erosion and indifference, for the power to go on using words in the face of the impossibility of mastering meaning. Winters, specifically, told of the fight for poetic expression, for words that go beyond words; Pinkerton the fight to use words instead of laurels to capture the life of the departed; Bowers the fight for one’s own integrity where we all use the same words. The words you unearth here, glorious tombstones, are only “what stands” when everything else, the <em>fond</em>, has fallen away.<br /><br />It makes me wonder what Winters thought – as some sort of irascible older brother – of the generation of American poets born starting about 100 years ago, the first to populate the academies, the ones who, while their generation was surviving the depression, saving the world, and rebuilding it, were as poets learning how to surrender. The amount of serious mental illness among that group is truly staggering: Roethke, Olsen, Bishop, Berryman, Schwartz, Rukeyser, Jarrell, Lowell, Patchen, Laughlin (plus honorary daughter Sylvia Plath) - the common thread a lost father they tried to reclaim through words. Winters could not be a father to those, but he did create a nest for the younger ones, gave them honesty with love, something only fathers can do.WAShttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10403669322174979974noreply@blogger.com