Hi Rebecca:
I think the poems you were "thinking of as continuing the preoccupations of
the pastoral, while having discarded or altered the traditional content and
stance, are those that are consciously arguing with, revising, revisioning
the pastoral, in which the pastoral itself, as a poetic form, becomes the
equivalent of the idyll" are part of what I was trying to point otward,
too. And I agree: "Which is why it's interesting, because it allows a
number of ways of engaging with the 'nature' of poetic seeing and language,
as well as all the issues connected with that, these various issues, of
power, of idealizing and being nostalgic about the dispossessed, of
holding a landscape in mind as a way of owning it, etc., those issues for
which the discussion has faulted the traditional pastoral as being
nostalgic, conservative, etc." And as I'm re-reading Christian Bök's Eunoia
for my class, I am intrigued to note that a 'pastoral' play every so often
slide into one of the sections of each chapter (words with only one vowel
being the major formal 'turn' of the poem); of course, when it does so, as
with eveything else in the poem, it does so in an awry manner...
This poem you passed on is very neat, but I suspect that's a 'Then' not a
'They' in the last line? Thanks for it...
Doug
>Retiro
>
>Entering the huge cauldron
> --roar uproar--
>feet urgent
>skin alert
>seeing
> in each undercurrent whirlwind
> bottled-up line
> tail shoving rubbing insistence
> handbag with monster ticket-window
>a robot that announces my passage
>animating through its shirt
>a battery-operated heart
> Give me a fugitive ticket
> to an invisible destinatio.
>They give me one for yesterday.
Douglas Barbour
Department of English
University of Alberta
Edmonton Alberta Canada T6G 2E5
(h) [780] 436 3320 (b) [780] 492 0521
http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/dbhome.htm
There is no real
world, my friends.
Why not, then
let the stars
shine in our bones?
Robert Kroetsch
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