Yes, I would back up Doug's love of Robin Blaser's collection of essays,The
Fire. They are brilliant. And, for me, several essays serve as a core
elucidation of the foundation and practice of the 'serial' poem. The
adventure and discovery one can find in writing in the manner of. (Like,
Blazer says somewhere, the poem (the writing) goes from dark room to dark
room, and turning on the light switch to see what might be illuminated and
noted there).
Stephen V
Walking Theory is my new book from Junction Press.
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> Thinking about that, a well as all the discussion about lyric, I found
> the following in Robin Blaser's 'The Recovery of the Public World,' in
> his amazing volume of essays, The Fire:
>
> It comes a few pages after his statement: 'The forgetfulness of our
> cultural condition destroys our ability to think.' He owes much in this
> essay (& elsewhere) to Hannah Arendt.
>
> "The inability to understand the modern project of being in the world
> turns into a cultural forgetting. Some years ago, during one of my
> lectures on modernism -- Picasso's Les demoiselles d'Avignon large on
> he wall behind me -- a hand went up, The student asked, 'Sir, did you
> make this us?' After a puzzled moment, I burst into laughter. The
> student replied, 'Well, you're talking about things seventy years old.
> Why haven't I ever heard of them?' This, it turned out, was no
> dumbbell, nor was he a country bumpkin. His resentment was real and
> thoughtful. A victim of educational effacement. But, then, one
> whispers, his parents, his teachers, the system that tutors him, none
> of them could fill the emptiness. Charges of elitism become silly and
> dangerous under such cultural circumstances."
>
> &
>
> "The story of how human became human is told by the arts and religion,
> the latter understood outside dogmatic definitions and entrenchments.
> Here, our most powerful current belief system, technology and its moony
> progress, steps in. I have no regrets -- what with kitchen fixtures,
> furnaces, hot water, plumbing, etc. [I'm sure we're all with him here]
> -- but as a belief system, it does trouble my sleep. Technology offers
> no image of the world, nor is it a guide to vital relations therein. It
> is projective of the human will let loose upon the world. Where form
> should be alive, the activity of relations in the world, it is
> consumed. Technology is an ultimate humanism and it promises a further
> 'gap between past and future.'"
>
> Oddly, putting such thinking together with his poetry, I also find that
> Blaser is a master of getting beyond traditional lyric concerns while
> still, often, holding fast to the lyric music that is, to him, a core
> of being human in the world (not 'humanist' in the senses he is
> exploring in this complex & rewarding essay).
>
> Doug
> Douglas Barbour
> 11655 - 72 Avenue NW
> Edmonton Ab T6G 0B9
> (780) 436 3320
> http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/
>
> Latest book: Continuations (with Sheila E Murphy)
> http://www.uap.ualberta.ca/UAP.asp?LID=41&bookID=664
>
>
> Art has to be forgotten: Beauty must be realized.
>
> Piet Mondrian
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