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A World of Things
Bill Knott asks some important (to the extent that poetry is important) questions here and here. His focus is Objectivism (the Zukofsky/Williams/Reznikoff/Oppen Objectivism, not the hilariously stupid “philosophy” cooked up by that maven of selfishness, Ayn Rand), one of the root assumptions of which is the notion that content doesn’t matter. In fact, Objectivist poetry exalted a world of things, a world without meaning—except for the significance imposed upon it by the poet.Read More
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News that Doesn’t Stay News, or The Meaning of “Is”
The Abstract from a study recently published by the Joan Shorenstein Center at Harvard University: The current debate over waterboarding has spawned hundreds of newspaper articles in the last two years alone. However, waterboarding has been the subject of press attention for over a century. Examining the four newspapers with the highest daily circulation in the country, we found a significant and sudden shift in how newspapers characterized waterboarding.Read More
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On Imaginal Space
[This expands on my previous post, which it may help to read first.] I use the word “imaginal” to mean something far beyond the Webster’s definition, “of or relating to imagination, images, or imagery.” I mean it in the sense defined by the great scholar of Islamic mysticism Henry Corbin: …alam al-mithal, the world of the Image, mundus imaginalis: a world as ontologically real as the world of the senses and the world of the intellect, a world that requires a faculty of perception belonging to it, a faculty that is a cognitive function, a noetic value, as fully real…Read More
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Neglect
I’ve been pondering a statement made sometime back in a blog post by Bill Knott: “I don’t believe there are any unjustly forgotten 20th Century USAPO—the myth of the unjustly forgotten dead poet.” I love Knott’s contrarianism but wonder about this notion, especially today when I’ve run across a lovely glimpse into one of William Blake’s notebooks, housed at the British Library. The Library’s introduction notes, “William Blake is famous today as an imaginative and original poet, painter, engraver, and mystic.Read More
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Mexico Books 2009: Immanent Visitor
I can’t pretend to understand the writing of Bolivian poet Jaime Saenz. It seems to arise from the imaginal without taking on the perceptual particularities we’ve come to expect from poetry in the long wake of Imagism and Objectivism (no, not the silly philosophy of Ayn Rand). For me, reading Saenz is similar to reading Blake‘s prophetic books, but Saenz doesn’t seem to be presenting a coherent visionary system; his poems are more surreal than symbolic—but in many ways even stranger and more compelling than almost any surrealist poetry I can think of.Read More
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Adios, Hayden Carruth
I have been asked more than once recently what book I would want with me if I were stranded on a desert island. (People who ask this forget the key word “desert,” which—if we took it seriously—would dictate something far too slender.) The complete works of William Blake was one of my answers. But today I have to revise that choice. It would have to be the complete works of Hayden Carruth, who died last night at age 87. I discovered Carruth’s poetry through his prose.Read More
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Duty and Delight
Thankfully, Bill Knott has resurrected his blog, where he has been posting links to those of his collections that he is making available through his storefront at Lulu.com (both as bound volumes and as free PDF downloads). He’s also reposting some good material from his old blog.Read More
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Bacon on Blake
This haunting study for a portrait of William Blake by the painter Francis Bacon is worth spending some time with: Click here.Read More
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Blake on Imagination
“To the Eyes of a Miser a Guinea is more beautiful than the Sun & a bag worn with the use of Money has more beautiful proportions than a Vine filled with Grapes. The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the Eyes of others only a Green thing that stands in the way. Some See Nature all Ridicule & Deformity & by these I shall not regulate my proportions, & Some Scarce see Nature at all But to the Eyes of the Man of Imagination Nature is Imagination itself.Read More