wonderful, great contextualisation & lovely lexical aplomb
KS
On 21/11/2007, Frederick Pollack <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Envy and Dialectic
>
>
> The *Paris Review* will never interview me.
> If they did I'd go on and on
> with fractious dicta and dreary nostalgia
> of the sort that never get in my poems.
> Eventually they'd have to publish
> several volumes of interviews
> with me,
> like those someone did with Milosz
> so that he could discuss
> the effect of German bullets on strolls in Warsaw
> and modern verse,
> or the one he arranged so his friend Wat
> could reminisce
> about his stay in nine Gulag camps.
>
> They are full, such books, of sardonic, distanced,
> aphoristic, humanistic wit,
> and are read by few
> outside their true audience,
> which is History itself. Which is not
> what marxists or ex-marxists
> or even liberal Polish quasi-Catholics
> think, but a roaring monster –
> the roar so terrible it is the monster.
> An aggrieved, outraged roar
> like that of an Inquisitor
> reading Spinoza, or
> a Fox News commentator,
> an abuser charged with abuse,
> a hundred Kansas fathers learning
> their daughters are pregnant lesbian Darwinists.
>
> You can hear it, a visceral rumble,
> in everything that happens
> and the background of sweet silent thought.
>
> It can't be, can it, the sensation
> I interpret as signals from the muse?
>
>
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