1.02.2008

Hpypa Wne EraY !

My resolution : to try some new things in writing. That's why I went & bought an old manual typewriter.

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A poem or an artwork "disintegrates" (Whitman's term for a precipitate) from the stream of time, interest, discourse, chores, etc. It falls, it drops from the sky... because it's complete, it's finished. It has wholeness, roundedness.

"Negative capability" has something to do with the poet's self-transference or absorption into the poem's complete little universe. Unwilled, unforced - a sort of love-manifest. Wholeness and inimitability - the poem radiates the intensity of this total self-transference. (Nobody mistakes Shakespeare for Jonson, or Herbert for Donne, for (obvious) example, or Marianne Moore for anybody else, & so on.)

Look for the density, the specific gravity, of the poet's entire emotional-intellectual participation in the birth of the poem.

This transfer - this back-&-forth - an image of the wholehearted self-giving (non-self-seeking) exchange which is love or charity. Reality as gift.

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