from the notebooks
it is not enough to simply be 'lyrical' in writing. i mean the standard epiphany at the end of the poem enacted by the 1st person pronoun.
what! give up lyrics?!
no, not at all -- too many writers either eschew 'personality' i.e. post-language writers, or have too much 'personality,' i.e. post-Bly writers.
then what?
a corrosive lyric -- a pessimistic optimism. a movement toward pleasure foregoing the blandishments of the so-called sublime.
8/25/02
2 Comments:
Richard, why even think in these terms? Why not just write what you wite as consciously as possible? And then - it is what it is? We're all living now so our poems will be of the now - and we're all fools and saps so our poems will be laughed at by future generations for how short we fell and what our blind spots were. But their laughter will be mixed with tears. As is our own.
absolutely, john. i don't think of the future so much as the past, which faulkner reminds us that the past is still in the present.
nevertheless, the notebook this extract is from was found by me as anna and i have spent this week cleaning and organizing our shit in the house and i found stuff i'd long forgotten about, like this notebook which spans the years 1996 to 2002.
i've always been a late-bloomer and this notebook is to me if no one else a map of my development as a poet, not as a poet writing decent texts, but a poet whose maturation is chronicled within these inkstained pages, however retarded my development may have been and still might be.
as to the future, there is no there there. we have just this here, now.
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