OK, I will stop saying what poetry "should be". At least for the moment.
Language is powerful. I throw rhetorical counter-weights against the facile, the clever, the affable blather. Let poetry be hard-won. Or totally unwilled. One or the other. Not this willed verbosity of the glib (my own included).
*
Yesterday, from somewhere in seedy old brain, had one of those faint involuntary memories. Vagueness of 8 yrs old, outside, somewhere near lake. Smell of pond, docks, marsh muck... childhood sensorium. Feeling of uncertain alertness, of being in strange or new place. Vividness of childhood reality. Of being child-size in dislocated landscape - someone else's property or agenda... in-betweenness, in transit, not in control...
as if I had been dreaming now of the sort of dreamy sense of reality a child has... mingling two dream-states.
*
I'm a typical Minnesotan : happy-go-lunky.
Showing posts with label involuntary memory. Show all posts
Showing posts with label involuntary memory. Show all posts
10.27.2006
9.10.2004
Latta-day Proust.
What a mighty vast meme was early 20th-cent. "memory"! The cork-lined French chap made a Mots-Valeurian personal epic out of it.
Out of Baudelaire, Bergson, Nietzsche - "eternal return". The Future is possibility; the Past is fixed; but the Present of writing, through reflection and reiteration, turns the Past once more toward possibility - a spectral revivimummifictation.
Memory functioning like a time-analogy for the spatialization - the multidimensionality - enacted by words on a page (blossoming into imaginative vision & empathy). Bergson's "fan of phenomena" (cf. Mandelstam) enacted (paradigmatically) as the reader opening a book.
Crane's Bridge thusly miniaturized Joyce's Ulysses technique. "America" as a cinematic sleight, an entire history dreamt in a single night in Manhattan.
Eliot's elegant epitome for the whole thing, at the opening of Four Quartets :
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
(But : see Keith Ward's book, Religion and Creation, for a discerning reconsideration of the whole traditional Platonic eternal "block time" changelessness perspective.)
What a mighty vast meme was early 20th-cent. "memory"! The cork-lined French chap made a Mots-Valeurian personal epic out of it.
Out of Baudelaire, Bergson, Nietzsche - "eternal return". The Future is possibility; the Past is fixed; but the Present of writing, through reflection and reiteration, turns the Past once more toward possibility - a spectral revivimummifictation.
Memory functioning like a time-analogy for the spatialization - the multidimensionality - enacted by words on a page (blossoming into imaginative vision & empathy). Bergson's "fan of phenomena" (cf. Mandelstam) enacted (paradigmatically) as the reader opening a book.
Crane's Bridge thusly miniaturized Joyce's Ulysses technique. "America" as a cinematic sleight, an entire history dreamt in a single night in Manhattan.
Eliot's elegant epitome for the whole thing, at the opening of Four Quartets :
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
(But : see Keith Ward's book, Religion and Creation, for a discerning reconsideration of the whole traditional Platonic eternal "block time" changelessness perspective.)
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