<<It is the only voice and persona which appeaces me,
in poetry.
Erminia>>
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Erminia, you can read Grossman's ideas about this in
The Sighted Singer: Two Works on Poetry for Readers
and Writers, by Allen Grossman with Mark Halliday. A
very interesting _collaboration_ between two very
different poets, but here's further explanation from
Grossman, and how it bears upon this anxiety of
authorship and poetic authority:
"My poetry is, in the most literal sense, the speech
of my mother, or rather, the completion of the speech.
My mother is a strange, dreaming person, and she is at
this very moment in Sri Lanka seeking a place where
dreams are real. The sense in which my poetry is
organized to justify hope goes deep back into a
personal history of intimacy, of a mother who was
restlessly and in some sense destructively
dissatisfied with the world around her. The
prolongation and, as it were, consummation of her will
toward a golden world is as veracious an account as I
can give of my motive to art. . .
Yes, I have insisted...on the notion that it is
_precisely_ her speech. . . I feel about poetry that
it is a demonized activity, that it is not. . . the
speech of a mortal or merely singular person. Poetry
in _my_ view has its power because it is the speech
not of an individual but of another who is more than
and different from the individual."
Rebecca
http://www.thedrunkenboat.com
--- Erminia Passannanti <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> On Wed, 20 Feb 2002 09:18:40 -0800, Rebecca Seiferle
> <[log in to unmask]>
> wrote:
>
>
> Allen Grossman saying that he
> >always "speaks in his mother's voice" which he
> >identified with the division between the Orphic and
> >Philomelic traditions to the crudest practitioners
> of
> >those who speak "for those who have no voice."
>
> How interesting, Rebecca, also I have used my
> mothers' voice, in a huge
> number of poem and in my poemetto called 'In
> Iugoslavia with my feet on
> the ground'.
>
>
> It is the only voice and persona which appeaces me,
> in poetry.
>
>
> Erminia
=====
Rebecca Seiferle's third recent poetry collection, Bitters, (Copper Canyon www.coppercanyonpress.org 2001)is nominated for the Pulitzer and National Book Award and two Pushcart Prizes.
Her translations of Alfonso D'Aquino and Ernesto Lumbreras are forthcoming in Reversible Monuments: An Anthology of Mexican Poetry (Copper Canyon, 2002). She is founding editor and publisher of The Drunken Boat, www.thedrunkenboat.com
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