Tides have a way of turning.

Art : successful marriage of ethos and harmony. (think Sophocles)

MAXIMS OF COOL QUIETUDE


That poem you love is an excerpt from the poem of Reality.

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You thought of form as shape or design; now think of form as (informing) principle.

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Twilight world.

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Needless to say, you gotta read da book to get da full treatmemt.

RS Crane quietly, succinctly surveys the last few many hundred yrs of poetry criticism, & finds that, despite all the excellencies, dey most of em summat missed the point.

Poetry remains an undiscovered moon.

Here's the conclusion to the section I quoted earlier:

"It is easy to see, therefore, why the critic who uses this language is necessarily restricted, in his selection of attributes for poetry or individual poems, to such characteristics as have clear counterparts or logical contraries in the non-poetic discourse which he takes as the other term of his comparison. This is not to say that the method is incapable of differentiating poetry, as poetry, from other things or of serving as a basis for practical criticism of a highly particularized and perceptive sort. It is, however, to say that the discriminations it permits between poetry and other forms of writing or between the various kinds of poetry are such - and such alone - as can be arrived at by asking what characteristics among those possible in discourse are here present and in what special modifications and combinations. It is not a method, in other words, that allows the critic, as Aristotle's method does, to consider poems in their peculiar aspect as distinct kinds of concrete wholes, of which the special character, as poetic wholes, is determined by internal principles of construction that have, at least as far as imitative poetry is concerned, no strict parallels in philosophy, science, rhetoric, or history." [pp.93-94]

unfinished life, inchoate experiment - finished by the written word.

the book is both lock & key.

everyone is too literalist, serious, ponderous, explicit, competitive.

art is not sports. we run too fast & slow for sports - the umpires get befuddled.

I want to go back to my reading habits of, say, age 14-18.

I want to shuffle off the coils of anxiety & trouble, toil & stress. back to when reading & daydreaming were one.

art is not sports, but it's sort of a game - how to express things... pleasing, penetrating...

what I write is not me; furthermore, it's only an approximation. (see Nicholas of Cusa on that)

an equilibrium (the inner Law) lies behind good literature. implicit rightness. le mot juste.

a portion of sanity & civilization. salted with spiritual rigor (the steep).

don't jade your appetite with excess. don't tyrannize your own climate.

don't harp on what you like, because then I won't like it. Just leave the book lying around : maybe I'll pick it up.

Time is one of the stage properties.

My ancestors taught me -
life is pioneering, pioneering is life.
(The nature of the frontier, however, was unforeseen.)

I'm a better poet than Osama Bin Laden, and always will be.

torque x risk - quietude + hebetude/hesychasm divided by sq.rt. divagation = nift (don't ask me what this means. I am going on the hypothesis that there is no connection with "nifty")

Poetry epitomizes and sums up what language does (or what we do with language) in practical life.

Arguments over blogs at the Buffalo Poetics List? Huh.

I think I won an argument with a turnip last night.

I'll be away for the weekend, so happy Valentine's Day to you!

I've been posting a lot recently on the long poem, Forth of July. Will probably be slowing down a bit here in days to come, in order to focus on other projects.

There's much I haven't gotten around to yet, such as the character & some details of the 3rd & 4th books (July & Blackstone's Day-Book), what the Native American aspects represent, et al.

Moreover today it strikes me I haven't even begun to articulate the poem's real grain or pith.

The Orpheus plot is truly mythical or symbolic in a certain way. It "stands for" something : perhaps merely for a pervasive feeling or emotion.

The long poem is a poem of longing.

The keynote of "Henry's" nostalgia - situated in a rather cramped little coastal state & dreaming of wide open steppes & midwestern prairies - is also symbolic; it represents or stands for a kind of inherent, continuous radiation or radiating image from the past, from life as a whole, from childhood onward - the dream or memory of Melville's everlasting oceanic "green Tahiti of the soul." (the grassblade light.)

from Mendelssohn (the childhood neighborhood) to Mandelstam's black earth. mendel/mandel = "almond". 2 illustrations from Stubborn Grew, early & late:

The land, the land stretched out toward sundown.
At the end of the forests without end, the sun gleamed.
Magnitudes undreamt
by Greeks, the dry flute flown

 
into moist green, light fern-green
ghosts in the trees.
I'm driving the empty roads
in early May, at dawn.

 
Someone cries out Eurydice, Eurydice
into ramshackle and forlorn wastelands.
Blind joyful grief behind the railroad lines.
All gone to seed.  Oh say can you see.

 
--

 
Upon a Roman rood was fixt
clay lips gone underground.  Still
through the pinedoor, drifted sound.
Her calling me.  A morning rose.  Finixt.

 
Catch us the little foxes, Solomon,
that spoil our vineyard.  Lucky,
true love's the cardinal pt (sd Bluejay).
A monde, almond.  All made.  I thirsty, mon.