tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21999805.post7689129497291245833..comments2024-03-28T19:56:32.848-05:00Comments on Anecdotal Evidence: `Terrain Where We Have Never Been'Patrick Kurphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08436175583386298032noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21999805.post-47348955455683160922009-11-12T01:38:58.320-06:002009-11-12T01:38:58.320-06:00I enjoyed this entry. "Imaginative awe"...I enjoyed this entry. "Imaginative awe"--sounds about right.<br /><br />I hadn't read "Reading to the Children" yet...very Passover Seder Four Questions-ish, in a good way.<br /><br />I usually turn to Creeley's "The Language" for insight into poetry--he talks about "words full of holes" and the fact that "speech is a mouth."<br /><br />One heck of a comment, William, and the Wright anecdote was great.Hannah Stephensonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15792203070774504501noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21999805.post-32062366183991713192009-11-11T11:13:02.691-06:002009-11-11T11:13:02.691-06:00Thanks Patrick. This poem is one of my favourites ...Thanks Patrick. This poem is one of my favourites written by Morris.<br /><br />It seems right that you look to Morris, who depended so much on memory and autobiograpy, for your comment today.Jonathannoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21999805.post-28797181369643917072009-11-11T11:01:56.437-06:002009-11-11T11:01:56.437-06:00Your approach to this age-old question is refreshi...Your approach to this age-old question is refreshingly original—a poem must exhibit joy in its own being. That’s food for thought for sure.<br /><br />All productions of art become orphans, but poems are those even the orphanage can’t process. I think of the line from Stevens: “music is feeling then, not sound,” and of the first paragraph from Kafka’s <i>The Castle</i>: “Nothing of the castle could be seen, fog and darkness surrounded him, not even the faintest gleam of light pointed to the great castle. K. … looked up into the seeming emptiness.” The connecting pillars are simply not there. <br /><br />I liken the poetic feeling to an overcast morning, that point between drab gray and the smell of wet dirt, when as part of a mysterious process in motion, some absence finds its way from the soul.<br /><br />That's as far in the general direction of pretentiousness as I care to go. I don't understand why people don't leave poetry alone as they would, say, baseball after the 1991 World Series, or presidential politics after the 2000 elections. All you can say is “that's baseball” or “that's politics,” pause, and go on savoring it. Not so for the current generation of careerist poets, who, in thousands of blog entries and academic articles, have for the most part replaced “the rigors of their self-imposed craft” with talk about poetics. I have spent too many hours I will never get back reading the theories that come off this peculiar assembly line, the concern for finding the proper poetic <i>occasion</i>, for <i>earning</i> one's metaphors, making <i>friends</i> with ambiguity, being <i>properly</i> respectful of the fact that life is ultimately about nothingness and death. You would think that they were talking about their State Farm insurance agent! <br /><br />James Wright, upon realizing his son Franz was a poet, said “welcome to Hell.” The only thing wrong with this communal need to share what poetry is is that the poetry itself suffers. Poets are no different from CEOs and generals, they are in service to something, but in the case of poets, that something never shows its face, it only seems to whisper. Trying to capture that, like Nabokov after a butterfly, may be human, but it betrays a lack of faith.<br /><br /><i>[stepping off soap-box now]</i>WAShttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10403669322174979974noreply@blogger.com