>I've started books and just put them
> down after a few pages, and have never followed up why the work hasn't
> excited me, apart from a vague thought about rhythm

Bells ringing here too, and thanks as well to Harriet, and that dance of
'intellectual avoidance'. A very human matter that, and unintimate in scale.


Best

Dave


----- Original Message -----
From: <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Thursday, August 02, 2001 2:43 AM
Subject: Re: A contrary opinion of the worth of Ms Graham's recent poems


> > Is this inability related to a
> >frequent emptiness in her verse rhythms that denies an orgasmic
utterance, a
> >certainty of being? the poet is searching, searching for a "secret we
don't
> >know we're trying to find." All is the quiet though insistent voice of
the
> >searcher in exile, without fullness, with only the attempt
> >to touch, without the ability to yield to the final utterance of being."
>
> Thanks for that, Harriet - I think you've illuminated for me why I
> haven't been able to read Graham; I've started books and just put them
> down after a few pages, and have never followed up why the work hasn't
> excited me, apart from a vague thought about rhythm.
>
> I've been reading Douglas Oliver again lately, and there's a poet who
> does take the gamble of articulating being in language, but quietly and
> forcefully, without an ounce of sentiment; a startling humility at times,
> which is articulated with a poetic skill which at times is breathtaking.
> He had the courage to implode his intellectual structures if the human
> honesty of the poem required it, but he was never unintelligent, and he
> achieves a raw sense of feeling which is remarkable, and unusual - it
> makes me think of that line of Nietzsche's (which haunts me, and which
> I'm about to misquote) - The poets have not thought deeply enough, they
> have not understood feeling. Oliver was able to think deeply enough to
> come to real feeling. I liked this, from the prologue to the poem/prose
> sequence An Island That Is All The World, in relation to various other
> discussions which have been happening here:
>
> What does it mean to talk of spirituality in poetry when no religious
> belief lies behind the inquiry? An unfashionable question... Literary
> philosophy cannot escape scepticism or programmatic ambiguity about
> spiritual issues because we are trapped in a web of language, doomed, it
> seems, to disbelieve in the unity of self and of artistic forms: along
> with that, goes a loss of spirit. Such theorists are dangerous guides in
> areas where the poem, on the other hand, can make evident to the
> simple-hearted: "This happened - spirit entered language and
> simultaneously I perceived such and such sights, spoke such and such
> words."
>
> Best
>
> Alison
>