----- Original Message -----
From: "Douglas Barbour" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Monday, March 20, 2006 10:44 AM
Subject: Re: Snap/3-15-06--"The God Thing"
Missed the weekend's posts shoveling snow.
But this, Fred, while it makes sense to me does not make poetry, except
perhaps for the final 17 lines, & maybe just the final 7. Rexroth's
nature poems seem to me to be far more 'sacred' (let's not get into
'religious'), partly because the language doesnt drift into those large
abstractions...
Doug, I disagree. It's a modernist piety that overt philosophizing is to be
avoided and that any abstraction is a bad abstraction. Generally this
dictum is a wise one and I inflict it on my students. At the same time I
think poetry can go beyond it and I value poets like Rexroth and Macdiarmid
who do. What matters is the passion, precision, and inherent interest of
the abstractions. Probably they should be presented in at least a suggested
dialectic rather than dogmatically. The other term of that dialectic could
be the poet's work as a whole, prevailing beliefs of h/h times, or a
counterargument within the poem. The first part of the Rexroth poem of
which I quoted the second states, at the same length, a traditional
metaphysics, wherein the sane mine, "right reason," corresponds to a
coherent benign cosmos. Rexroth gives us this straight, dismisses it, then
launches into the part I quoted. I find it stimulating. I remember reading
the Four Quartets when I was in school, noticing that whole passages of them
were abstract religious special pleading, and wondering how they were
supposed to square with the symbolize-don't-state aesthetic I was being
taught. Of course, you're dealing with someone who doesn't think that
signifiers accomplish anything important when decoupled entirely from
signifieds, and who doesn't like either of the the Howe sisters.
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