The Former formertive fortress-thoughts, & the Latta on sculpture.
solidity & many-sidedness. approachable-impregnable. more than the sum of its rip-offs.
sculpture is serious. the expense of sweat & the weight and roundness, the fact that it's just going to sit there.
though there is plenty of lightness & humor in sculpture nowadays.
not that I know much about it.
in sculpture the design is its own armature and gravity is built into the equilibrium. what you see is design itself, and you feel its weight. (& the materials, their sheen or depth.)
a sculpture ornaments or crowns a place. it is built to last.
it marks a happy contingency, at the insection of objective & subjective.
sculpture is just an extension of landscape, a salience. ridges, rocks, trees - even meadows are sculpted.
Showing posts with label fortress. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fortress. Show all posts
7.18.2005
7.14.2005
Sometime they might look at what I did with the "Henry" persona, in the Island Road sonnets, in Stubborn, etc.
Berryman put on the "Henry" mask, and recorded the nuclear decay of the Confessional mode.
With me, "Henry" came back, Berrymannish, Joyce-ish. In his Byzantium, his Dublin-Petersburg fortress, in his Little Rhody world.
The only one to show any critical interest, so far, has been that other masquer, Kent Johnson.
The fictional "Henry" was a means to an end : to provide a narrative context for the poetry.
The authority of poetry is the authority of a mask. That is, how you sculpt the mask - what materials you apply to funnel the voice, the tone - affects the transmission of the "content" & themes.
Berryman put on the "Henry" mask, and recorded the nuclear decay of the Confessional mode.
With me, "Henry" came back, Berrymannish, Joyce-ish. In his Byzantium, his Dublin-Petersburg fortress, in his Little Rhody world.
The only one to show any critical interest, so far, has been that other masquer, Kent Johnson.
The fictional "Henry" was a means to an end : to provide a narrative context for the poetry.
The authority of poetry is the authority of a mask. That is, how you sculpt the mask - what materials you apply to funnel the voice, the tone - affects the transmission of the "content" & themes.
7.13.2005
I guess "fortress" is a rather guarded, defensive way to imagine it.
I am wearing bright green sneakers as I write this.
"poetry is the joining of two strands". With that, Mandelstam had something specific in mind, but there are other ways of applying it.
Like thinking of poetry as displaying the harmonious union of technique and genius (inspiration). "she makes it look easy" : because the technique is driven by an overwhelming impulse or motivation, an ordering impulse. magnetizing, harmonizing, expanding, concentrating.
separate, separate, separate from the everyday.
I am wearing bright green sneakers as I write this.
"poetry is the joining of two strands". With that, Mandelstam had something specific in mind, but there are other ways of applying it.
Like thinking of poetry as displaying the harmonious union of technique and genius (inspiration). "she makes it look easy" : because the technique is driven by an overwhelming impulse or motivation, an ordering impulse. magnetizing, harmonizing, expanding, concentrating.
separate, separate, separate from the everyday.
...[Actually, & I've mentioned this before, I did model the stanzaic structure of The Grassblade Light after the design of a fortress built by Frederick II in southern Italy. Octagonal, with these square towers at the angles.]
Verking on some new versts. Will it amount to anything? I do not know. Experienced so many bloopers & false starts lately. It feels better to be trying, anyway.
Probably shouldn't post them, seems like bad luck. Which means I probably will.
What do I think of POETRY today? Enjoying Latta's uncommonplace speed-book, as usual. & the William Loganisms over here. AND a good summing-up of sumping by Gospodin Samizdat.
There is so much of everything nowadays, so much wordage, that poetry will have to be built like a fortress. Surrounded by yap-yap, workage-in-ploddage, schoolroom industry (all the conferences, all the workshops, all the pronouncements...), it will have to become formidable, impregnable... Not hermetic, though - rather, the reader will have the sensation of being surrounded by a fortress. It will not bend to any discursive formulae, yet it will answer for itself & everything.
Think of it the way composers or old blues guys or painters think about where they come from : overshadowed by thick sounds and sharp tones and bass notes from the past. Something separate, separate, separate from the exchange. Something people make by turning deep down, a personal dream - something from working in solitude with the materials of vision.
Probably shouldn't post them, seems like bad luck. Which means I probably will.
What do I think of POETRY today? Enjoying Latta's uncommonplace speed-book, as usual. & the William Loganisms over here. AND a good summing-up of sumping by Gospodin Samizdat.
There is so much of everything nowadays, so much wordage, that poetry will have to be built like a fortress. Surrounded by yap-yap, workage-in-ploddage, schoolroom industry (all the conferences, all the workshops, all the pronouncements...), it will have to become formidable, impregnable... Not hermetic, though - rather, the reader will have the sensation of being surrounded by a fortress. It will not bend to any discursive formulae, yet it will answer for itself & everything.
Think of it the way composers or old blues guys or painters think about where they come from : overshadowed by thick sounds and sharp tones and bass notes from the past. Something separate, separate, separate from the exchange. Something people make by turning deep down, a personal dream - something from working in solitude with the materials of vision.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
