"Try to keep up. We were talking - to recap -
about sex and violence. As I no longer own
a television set, I am of course unqualified
to discourse on either topic. The lifting
of skirts or shirts (depending on one's target
audience) is a perennial theme of verse.
So, too, are fisticuffs, glassings and multiple
stab-wounds. Do I sense a connection?
Stir in metaphysics, and you have the very
substance of the modern lyric: the canvas
spotted, then smeared, with bloody goo; beyond
ostentation, beyond melancholy, the blasted,
wasted talent - prophetic by its own
lights - up to its eyes in seeping plenitude."
(from The Spirit Zone, by Dominique Fox)
I find the entire poem The Spirit Zone a delightful if not indispensably
crude exhibition of power. It is exactly the kind of staff I was expecting
from you, therefore rewarding, to my ears.
Here it rains heavenly. It makes one feel happy, all this thundering and
flashings as though being under some curse. I do not know in what measure
our individual interest for the poetry of Geoffrey Hill and our close study
of his language as brought our own poetics close.
It is him, probably, the bearded father of negation and flagellation,
whose built up egocentric "magnitude" one reacts to and against and
reflects upon at various degree of affiliation. Making one conceive a plan
for disorder, to get rid of such a weighty burden as well as to acknowledge
its worth.
I wrote you about the disciplined life of Federico Sanguineti, a long
letter about his "sentimental" tastes. I hope you received it.
There were many skirts lifted and shirts unbuttoned in that story I was
narrating you.
To conclude, with a clear note, my appreciation of your The Spirit Zone
(which could be one of the many adequate answers to The Spirit Level by
Seamus Heaney) , is complete, like the devotion one might have for the
white hairy chest of an old Brazilian poet.
Erminia
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