Touche?
I was thanking you, Henry, not crossing swords with you. (Very odd
battlelines being drawn up, though, I must admit.)
And now I think we're jointly bringing something else into alignment that
didn't occur to me until after I'd sent off my lens post, but which your
picking up on the possible gestures of humility has reinforced. You asked,
"Once you've deciphered the etymology, what's the summation?" (adding that
it suggested Pater to you). I think what Graham's conjuring or referencing
is older than Pater, and the rainbow's the connection (another blow for
"iridescence"!), but "The Surface" is another reading-response poem, all
right. (This is one of the things I love the most in Prynne's work too--the
lens of reading as lyric mode. Couldn't agree more with Alison's take on
Prynne as "profoundly lyrical," but would say the same of Graham in this
regard and of "The Surface" in particular.) In fact, just to give myself the
satisfaction of sawing off my own thin branch before anyone else does, I'll
go so far as to say that Prynne and Graham, in taking the lyric in a
philosophic direction poetically (and however differently, style-wise), are
revolutionizing it by a fusion of what's traditionally been a division of
labor between the poem of images (lyric) and the poem of ideas (philosophic)
to give us a new lyric of ideas. (Whaddyarekkon, Henry?)
In "The Surface," Graham's appealing to and arguing with Grosseteste and
Bacon, I suspect, and, recalling that for them optic science was theology,
she's reversing the same association via the lens of the iris in its
multiple senses to make the mote in her own I/eye a spiritual vehicle for
the poem. (How's that for summa-tion, you punk scholastic you?)
Candice
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