Have you ever had a teacher, who inspired you at the time, and you needed that, but then you look back and realize that you are now in complete disagreement with much of what they said. For example, "you should read Robert Bly", which I did, and so for awhile I was one of those aspiring faux deep image poets, all hung up on 'image' and such.
An important breaking away point for me was reading The Sonnets, which somehow fit in with my weird worldview and nascent buddhism, I liked it immediately. But The Sonnets also allowed me to see all these other tributaries in plain view from where my writing currently was. To my mind it had some 'leaping', actually a dazzling, breathtaking, heartbreaking amount of 'leaping', but it was also much more free in it's associations and syntax then most work I was into at the time. And eventually of course, I came to realize that the whole concept of 'leaping' is actually pretty questionable, and that the whole deep image thing was basically an appropriation of the 'raw' by the 'cooked'.
Dear Hauser, hello. It is 5:15 am
ReplyDeletedear Berrigan. He died
Back to books. I read
James Wright passed apporximate
coterminus
It is 2:30pm in Milwaukee,
been running around all day
Many things are current, and of
these the least are not always
children
Dear Hauser, It is 5:15 am
Upon his structured tomb
Still they mean something. For the
dance
And the architechture.
Weave among incidents
To work mine end upon their senses
I'll drown my book
Keats WAS a baiter of bears
Maybe that's how Keats really died.
ReplyDeleteActually it was an alchemical accident in which he tried to inhabit the sexual organs of a nightingale and instead mutated into a brown recluse spider which was ultimately squashed by a peasant. Legend has it though, that the exoskeleton of the spider did retain the sensitivity of the nightingale genitalia, and so Keats was able to die in throws of sensuality, but that last part seems totally over-romanticized.
ReplyDelete