Candice wrote:
> I have a deep suspicion of oppositions between poetry and
>you-name-it that cast the poet in an implied parallel position of mystic,
>shaman, pope--some sort of Overspeaker for truth in general or true feeling
>in particular, someone with a unique access to the human heart in everything
>but the physiological sense.
This is the danger of extraction - to think that this is what Douglas
Oliver is doing is a complete misunderstanding of his poetry, which is
the reverse of the arrogance you describe, and the poem which follows
that prologue (An Island that is All the World) is a lengthy exploration
which bears out and illuminates his questioning. I read the quotation as
pointing out the anguishing traps of language, written by someone utterly
familiar with (and hardly dismissive of) literary philosophy, who finds
its parameters nevertheless inadequate to many of the dilemmas and actual
intensities of lived experience - not as a poet, but as a human being
driven to poetry. The opposition, if such it is, is between protective
intellectual insulation and the raw stuff of living - death, joy, love,
sorrow - which are hardly shamanistic or mystic, but common to all of us.
His fidelity to the idea of a unity of self, despite the fragmentations
of which we're all aware, is sharpened by various encounters with death
and is borne out btw in contemporary neurological research. I find it a
poetry of profound honesty and courage. We all know, surely, how
language can be used to hide behind; Oliver refuses that protection,
aware of its ambiguities nevertheless, and tries to find something else.
Without, as he says specifically, the heraldry of religion. It seems to
me an attempt to find a way to unillusion. It does of course bear the
risks of that attempt, which he is hardly unaware of.
As for that embarrassing word "simple" - here it hardly means
"simple-minded" but gestures perhaps to the "simplicity" of Blake. Or
the simplicity that Neruda talks about ("naked, you are simple as a hand"
- how simple is a hand?) That is, a directness of perception and
response, which in poetry enters language, and which is, of course, on
examination, not simple at all. The cringe might well be that same
embarrassment Steiner talks about when faced with the poetic - or what
others have described as a "half turning away" which occurs in reading
Rilke. But I can only suggest you read some of Oliver, and especially
that poem, which is not "simple" in the sense you have read it at all.
Best
Alison
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