HG Poetics
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Henry Gould's guide to poetry and poetics.
HG Poetics
3y ago
UNEXPECTED LIGHT
courtesy of Dennis Overbye & NY Times (12.8.20)
Slight threads of Agnes Martin
touch their way across a night sea.
The universe is a shade too bright.
…more very faint galaxies or star clusters
contributing to the background light.
The most likely explanation, he said…
a less exciting possibility… “we messed up
and missed a light source or camera
artifact that we should have figured out.
This is what I worry about the most.”
But how dark is dark? …t ..read more
HG Poetics
3y ago
I hang my head low for the previous blog-post. So dry, so tired, so uninspired. The cliches do not help get my meaning across.
What, what am I trying to say?
I'm wrestling with you, American poets - children of Emerson & Whitman. I'm wrestling with you, American poets - children of Eliot & Pound. I have a quarrel with both your camps.
I'm a wrestler. I was a Blake School varsity wrestler (with Al Franken, no less).
With Emily Dickinson, I declare : I am a child of Awe. As for poets, I say - we are all children of Awe.
- Awe-way, Yaw-way... what's it ..read more
HG Poetics
3y ago
My "theory" of poetry, how I think about poetry in general or in the abstract, is idiosyncratic and fundamentally improvised. I don't have a system or a rationale which I can advocate for or teach, as objective or universally relevant. Nevertheless I feel the urge to organize my thoughts and defend my own practice. Blogs are exquisitely appropriate for this kind of off-the-cuff table-talk, aren't they? Sure, Henry.
And inevitably I'm bound to repeat myself. I've been blogging along here for years. Sorry about that.
I think poets are usually drawn to po ..read more
HG Poetics
3y ago
In 1961 cultural historian and Americanist (& specialist in New England Puritanism) Roy Harvey Pearce published a book, The Continuity of American Poetry. Clearly a labor of love, the work is a meticulous and passionate appraisal, unfolding a kind of American pantheon, from the Puritans to the mid-century moderns - with a special focus on the "long poem" - culminating in a juxtaposition of Eliot and Stevens, as representing two fundamental modes or "basic styles" - the "Adamic" and the "mythic" imagination. Both modes hinge on Pearce's central insight : that the specifically ..read more
HG Poetics
3y ago
Serves me right - after my glib gab here yesterday about dreams, la vida es sueno, etc. - that last night I would wake up at 3 a.m. after a dark & troubling dream that stirred my conscience. Jealousy, violence, remorse... strange symbolism of the heart.
"The heart is desperately corrupt"... says the prophet Jeremiah.
Lay awake thinking about the dream for a long time.
My comments in yesterday's post about holism in literature, philosophy, theology - and about the Union, and the common good, sought through the civic faith of Gorski's "American covenant" - were undercut a little by ..read more
HG Poetics
3y ago
After a super-natural lightning-&-thunderstorm over Minnesota last night, today it's very clear and quiet here in Minneapolis. My family is happily up in the woods; I'm staying home to care for my 92-yr-old mother, who's lying a-bed in hospice now, nearby.
I used to blog on HG Poetics A LOT. Now that Ravenna Diagram is a done thing - finished, packed, booked - I'm someways at loose ends. Feeling the predictable anxiety for the poem's future, its reception (or non-). And trying to live with this awkward new rhythm of NOT writing the absorbant river-poem every ..read more
HG Poetics
4y ago
MARBLE TOY
On this defunct St. Emperor Henry’s Day
the cavaliers of Christ broke down the walls
massacred the cityfolk, & found
the Holy Sepulchre. & it was empty.
His midget kingdom was a bit of ground
6 ft. x 6. Beneath Jo’s linen palls
that Body slept, 3 nights… then slipped away.
So Earth corrals the sun again (at mid-July).
Old Henry rotates his lugubrious clay
like cenotaph, or marble toy. Through hells
of blinded crowds – mesmeric crown
for snobbish mobs, heartless autocracy –
deracinated tribes, bent for destruction.
So humankind spins round its Book of ..read more