Nigel. Also might try recent biography of Spicer, Poets Be Like Gods:
Jack Spicer and the San Francisco Renaissance for more background on
Borregard as well as some bibliographical info. I seem to recall that
Borregard got considerable play in the book. Also, contact authors of
Spicer bio., Lewis Ellingham & Kevin Killiam.-Carlo Parcelli

Peter Quartermain wrote:
>
> I br e ak my lurk, just this once, at least till another time.
>
> Ebbe Borregard so far as I know did not write much, and probably published
> less. The only book I know is a small chapbook, something-or-other Sonnets
> -- all I can remember is the word Sonnets in the title, written over /
> under the pseudonym of Gerard or maybe Gerald Boar. I think, but would not
> swear to it, that Donald Allen published it with his Four Seasons
> Foundation, around 20 or more years ago, but I can't find my copy so have
> to stay vague.
>
> Maybe this little info will jog Alan Halsey's memory?
>
> P
>
> >At 12:45 10.9.1999, Nigel Wood wrote:
> >>Hello,
> >>
> >>Could anyone tell me anything about the American poet Ebbe Borregaard? I
> >>discovered him a few years ago in the New American Poetry anthology and
> >>have been trying to find books by him / information about him ever
> >>since, but so far, apart from a couple of namechecks in articles on Jack
> >>Spicer, have discovered almost nothing. Any information anyone can give
> >>me, either biographical or bibliographical, or just pointing me towards
> >>where I might find out more, would be greatly appreciated.
>
> + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
> Peter Quartermain
> 846 Keefer Street
> Vancouver
> B.C.
> Canada V6A 1Y7
> Voice : 604 255 8274
> Fax: 255 8204
>
> + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +

--
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Date: Fri, 1 Oct 99 11:44:57 +1000
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Subject: Dilemmas
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Stephen wrote:

>I would venture to say that some on the list have reached a
>consensus, and share a common notion of what poetry is --while some of us,
>think differently.

I have to say I haven't really worked out a consensus on this list.
Perhaps I haven't been paying enough attention.

Categories seem less and less useful to me, but there has to be some
alternative to sludgy generalisations that doesn't ultimately harden into
dogma of one kind or another: I haven't found one for myself, beyond
confessions of contingency or doubt. De gustibus non est disputandum,
for sure, but I'm not certain there is anything else but individual taste
to go on. All one can hope to do is clarify subjective responses,
whatever twangs innerly, and speculate why the twanging.

However, I confess to one dogma I hold dear: poetry is made of words
placed in relationships, and the relationships are what we call language.
 What is beyond the materiality of the words in a poem - the
relationships between them - creates the charge or field I think of as
poetry. That transcendent quality itself is made of the materiality of
the words, their sounds and shapes and rhythms, as perceived in thought
or by sight or ear, and the commonest metaphor for it is silence. It is
inexplicable, it is where criticism almost without exception stops dead:
it can only deal with the materialities of the poems. Either that, or it
enters the realms of poetry itself, a different kind of responsiveness,
or responsibility: but then criticism is forced to abandon its hope of
explication.

For example: all the research and discoveries into the workings of the
brain, the tracings of chemical and electrical processes that fire
information from one place to another, that store and communicate, do not
come near to explaining the field called consciousness, the whole thing.
It has certainly often struck me that proponents of AI never seem to take
into account that a mind exists in a body with a bodily history and
countless means of awareness. Perhaps the nature of consciousness is
that it is inexplicable, that its existence is by virtue of its is, and
the delight of poetry its acceptance of this finitude, a humbling of the
intellect in the face of the actual, where it discovers its mereness and
insufficiency.

The thing about categorisation, and I know it's useful, as a way of
making sense of the world, and has fundamentally shaped our thinking, and
is perhaps part of the way we are wired to perceive - my mother is like
me, and not like my father, might be one of the earliest thoughts I had -
the thing about categories is that it divides, and so subtly or unsubtly
cuts off or elides relationship, which is something less stable than
likeness or difference, more a dynamic quality of responsiveness. To see
one thing clearly is probably impossible, because to see one thing is to
see many relationships, a movement in a field of movement, and the eye/I
seeing is part of the movement. You can make something stand still, and
decide its relationships in its field of movement are not essential to
perceiving it, and then it becomes something else and worse, so do you in
relation to it. This discussion about whether a poem is performative or
not, and how it is, is about relationship, no? between the poem and the
reader/listener, the poem and the poet. At some deep level surely
divisions between the heard/spoken/innerly read poetries are nonsensical,
if the poem, heard or read silently, exists in the moment and movement of
relationship: and that is not determinable or predictable and by its
nature is beyond categories, not being a thing as such.

In which case I have no idea how to talk about it, and so stutter into
silence.

Best

Alison






Alison Croggon
Editor
Masthead Literary Arts Magazine
PO Box 186
NEWPORT VIC 3015

Masthead online: http://www.masthead.com.au
Home page: http:www.fortunecity.com/victorian/bronte/338




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