The last verse lifts off and is a poem unto itself. You don't need the rest,
IMHO. Andrew
On 23 May 2010 11:54, Frederick Pollack <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> The Best Minds
>
>
> An obvious point: if most
> of what they write is vain,
> timid, *pompier, would I *want
> to hang out with them? And if they’re
> all there is, then where are
> those prescient and heroic lords of art
> whom I knew, at fourteen, would adopt me?
> Amidst what she will soon describe
> as flashbulbs (there are no more flashbulbs),
> the head of our department blinks forward
> and reads five new poems about her parents
> and makes a few remarks about remarks
> and accepts the award. She’s what there is.
>
> An obvious point, but I missed it.
> *There are no revelations*,
> said Jacobson; *everything’s there
> from the beginning*. But you keep it
> under wraps from yourself, so that the realization,
> when you stage it at last, has the forcefulness
> of youth, i.e., of youthful disillusion,
> and the question, *What do I hope for?* is one
> you might have asked then.
>
> With difficulties including no money,
> Leopardi, poet of infinity,
> the infinite withdrawal
> of the love-object, and the vanishing-point,
> escaped his arch-reactionary
> home and home-town and went to Rome.
> There the tables of wits and philosophers
> he had believed in, educating himself
> with illicit volumes and a single candle,
> existed but were never filled
> except with intrigue, spitefulness, contempt.
> And by now he had become, no doubt,
> uningratiating, prickly.
> Later, unable to get warm,
> he lived in overheated rooms,
> with few visitors, fewer friends,
> still fewer who remembered not
> to pet, for luck, his hunched back.
--
Andrew
http://hispirits.blogspot.com/
'Mother Waits for Father Late' republished available at
http://www.picaropress.com/
http://www.qlrs.com/poem.asp?id=766
http://frankshome.org/AndrewBurke.html
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