Will be blogging more or less permanently now at http://www.joshua-corey.com/blog/.
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Cahiers de Corey
"A notebook is an homage to surprise." (Mark Rudman)
Tuesday, January 21, 2014
Tuesday, January 14, 2014
Six Dimensions of Poetry
VOLTA
The turn, the break, "This Be the Verse." The clinamen, the swerve:
The atoms, as their own weight bears them down
Plumb through the void, at scarce determined times,
In scarce determined places, from their course
Decline a little-- call it, so to speak,
Mere changed trend. For were it not their wont
Thuswise to swerve, down would they fall, each one,
Like drops of rain, through the unbottomed void;
And then collisions ne'er could be nor blows
Among the primal elements; and thus
Nature would never have created aught.
Plumb through the void, at scarce determined times,
In scarce determined places, from their course
Decline a little-- call it, so to speak,
Mere changed trend. For were it not their wont
Thuswise to swerve, down would they fall, each one,
Like drops of rain, through the unbottomed void;
And then collisions ne'er could be nor blows
Among the primal elements; and thus
Nature would never have created aught.
Heidegger says that only a god can save us. But Lucretius says we have no gods. Only the volta.
DOUBLING
"I is another," says Rimbaud, castigating "the false significance of Self." The pronoun in the poem is the mask. The poem is the impossible touch of the other in the mirror. And the poem works by doubling: call it rhyme, call it repetition. How many flowers? "A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose."
A dimension is a question of structure.
CADENCE
The quality of time in the body (of the speaker, of the listener, of the line, of the poem).
SILENCE
Language is not identical with itself. Attentiveness to this.
Each dimension midwifes the emergence of the others.
THINGS
Language is not identical with itself. Forgetfulness of this.
The rhythmic emergence and submergence of the referent. Immanent mimesis of the poem, which does not describe things, which is a thing in relation to the other things it does not describe.
OUTSIDE
What the volta admits, what the language doubles, what the cadence remarks, what silence acknowledges, what cherishes the things.
The spirituality of the Möbius strip, which is a thing any child can make with a strip of paper and some tape.
The activeness of creatures without a creator.
What Hopkins calls "Christ." What Jews call
The Law. "There are no / final orders."
No home.
Hidden Leaves
A writer, PhD student, and Iraq veteran named Roy Scranton has posted an astonishing essay, "Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene," in "The Stone" blog on The New York Times website. Astonishing not only for its content, which deftly synthesizes a lot of the thinking on the anthropocene familiar to latter-day ecocritical discourse, but for being placed so prominently in a mainstream media outlet. Most astonishing to me is its juxtaposition of the warrior ethos known as Bushidō in its construction of a new ecological ethics; specifically, the ethic outlined in Hagakure ("hidden leaves"), the 18th-century samurai manual written by Yamamoto Tsunetomo, which advises the samurai to gain "freedom" by living as though he were already dead. Scranton read Hagakure while deployed to Iraq, and it seems to have kept him sane:
Instead of fearing my end, I owned it. Every morning, after doing maintenance on my Humvee, I’d imagine getting blown up by an I.E.D., shot by a sniper, burned to death, run over by a tank, torn apart by dogs, captured and beheaded, and succumbing to dysentery. Then, before we rolled out through the gate, I’d tell myself that I didn’t need to worry, because I was already dead. The only thing that mattered was that I did my best to make sure everyone else came back alive. “If by setting one’s heart right every morning and evening, one is able to live as though his body were already dead,” wrote Tsunetomo, “he gains freedom in the Way.”
In a remarkable rhetorical coup, Scranton goes on to extrapolate from his situation as a soldier in Baghdad to our situation in the Anthropocene, confronting the precarious death-in-life of modern civilization, a reality glimpsed in the form of Katrina, of Sandy, of our collective inability to put a meaningful curb on the tons of carbon pumped into the atmosphere every second. Scranton writes: "The biggest problem we face is a philosophical one: understanding that this civilization is already dead. The sooner we confront this problem, and the sooner we realize there’s nothing we can do to save ourselves, the sooner we can get down to the hard work of adapting, with mortal humility, to our new reality."
This argument will be familiar to readers of Bill McKibben's Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet. But it's the "already dead" thing that startles. The warrior ethic of Hagakure is feudal: it places the highest value on honorable service to one's lord, which depends on the vassal's subdual of the fear of death. It's a form of stoicism, of indifference to one's fate, coupled to the most lively imaginings of that fate ("shot by a sniper, burned to death, run over by a tank..."). Paradoxically, as suggested in the blockquote above, this stoic submission to fate, which is homeomorphic to submission to one's master, leads to "freedom in the Way" (Bushidō means "way of the warrior").
Now it may sound strange, but when I read Scranton's essay, I found myself wondering about the place of joy and ecstasy in an ethos appropriate to the Anthropocene. Why? Partly because the imagining of the body as dead, while the spirit is alive only to service, is a bit too Gnostic for my taste. It suggests that we must become zombies, re-enacting alien desires that we can't actually feel. It seems to me that our widespread denial of what's happening, our obsession with trivial digital glamour, our frenzied consumption, etc., is precisely a manifestation of a death-in-life characterized not by stoicism but acedia (the medieval monk's disease of indifference to his salvation).
More significant, I think, is the fact that if one truly imagines one's death, and the death of one's civilization (if not the death of humanity or the death of all life), does not life in the present take on the savor and intensity it otherwise lacks? Full presence in the here-and-now is not possible without the vivid imagination of the final boundary. I suppose I am simply reiterating what Heidegger calls "Being-toward-death" (a nice summary of which by Simon Critchley can be read here). There is a kind of ecstatic vitality that comes with confronting the reality of death, an appetite for presence and connection (with others, with one's own body, with ideas and traditions), in short, a meaningfulness that seems affectively if not substantively different from the stoicism of Hagakure.
In Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, a village is threatened with exploitation and destruction by bandits. The villagers resolve to hire masterless samurai for protection, but have nothing to offer except rice. "Find hungry samurai!" advises the village elder. "Even bears will come out of the forests when they're hungry." Most of the samurai recruited fit the Hagakure mold: the two leaders of the band seem certain that this adventure will result in their deaths, and proceed anyway. There is also a young and untried samurai named Katsushirō who at first seems more interested in flowers and the beautiful villager Shino than in thinking about death. He is in awe, however, of Kyūzō, who embodies more than any other member of the group the concept of living as though already dead. Stone-faced and laconic, he is the most terrifyingly effective of the assembled warriors, and Katsushirō crushes on him even harder than he does on Shino (who when he first meets her, is disguised as a boy; there's a lot of interesting homoeroticism in this film).
Then there's Toshiro Mifune's Kikuchiyo, whom as the viewer eventually learns is no samurai at all. He's a wild peasant dragging around an enormous sword, who identifies fully with the villagers and their precarious situation in a way the other characters do not. He is a vivid, earthy figure, full of laughter and rage, completely undisciplined, completely passionate, and in short as far from the sober ethos of Hagakure as one can imagine. But his commitment to life is large: he castigates the "real" samurai for not understanding the hardships of the farmers' lives, and he dies protecting them.
There's more than one way to be a samurai, in other words. There's more than one way to imagine death. It seems to me that more of us could stand to be like Kikuchiyo: conscious of our borrowed armor, attached to the earth, willing to die to defend the village from whose fate we do not separate ourselves. There is a fierce joy to be found in life on the precipice, not in stoicism but in something closer to a Nietzschean amor fati. We all must die; all must die. Let's be alive while we're here. Which means a commitment to the everyday, which means resisting domination and banditry with any and every means at our disposal.
I think this possibilty--this dark joy--is what's missing from Scranton's essay; and it's the resource we most need if the village is to stand any chance at all.
Thursday, January 09, 2014
A Home on the Web
After about a zillion years in Internet time, I've gone and created a permanent webpage for myself at www.joshua-corey.com. Do stop by for a visit.
Thursday, January 02, 2014
"I return to sentences as a refreshment": Ambience, Consecution, the Open
I began writing what became Beautiful Soul simply as a series of sentences. Very long sentences, as it happens, with enough comma splices to risk revocation of my license as an English professor. A poet works in phrases and above all in lines; sentences are exotic. Nearly as seductive to me are paragraphs, very long paragraphs, the sort of long paragraphs one encounters reading Proust and Adorno and Saramago. Stanzas and strophes have nothing on paragraphs for their elasticity, their infinite yet tensile capacity. "Sentences are not emotional but paragraphs are," says Gertrude Stein. But the problem with sentences and paragraphs is not that they are emotional or unemotional. It's that they say things. And saying things, as I like to remind my writing students, is not what poetry is for.
Mallarmé: "I say: a flower! and, out of the oblivion into which my voice consigns any real shape, as something other than petals known to man, there rises, harmoniously and gently, the ideal flower itself, the one that is absent from all earthly bouquets." Poetic voicing is inseparable from oblivion, from the invisible. But fictive voicing is all too mimetic, all too obliterative of oblivion. It is difficult for fiction to recapture its fundamental rhetoricity; it is difficult not to lapse completely into what John Gardner called "the fictive dream": "the writer forgets the words he has written on the page and sees, instead, his characters moving around their rooms, hunting through cupboards, glancing irritably through their mail, setting mousetraps, loading pistols." The reader forgets too. It's like Eliot's objective correlative, only without the objective part. It's language idealized, all spirit and no letter.
Fictive sentences don't have to work this way. There's Gordon Lish and his theory of "consecution," as explained in a valuable essay by one of his students, Gary Lutz: "a recursive procedure by which one word pursues itself into its successor by discharging something from deep within itself into what follows." The writer reacts to the material properties of constellated words and letters, and proceeds by association from one sentence to the next. In a manner somewhat akin to Ron Silliman's "new sentence," each sentence exists in its own torqued bubble, generative of and yet separate from the sentence that follows it (Lutz calls his article on consecution, "The Sentence Is a Lonely Place"). In a review of Lish's own novel, Peru, David Winters claims that for Lish, "composition cuts across ontology, not only aesthetics" (italics in original).
Winters goes on to compare the "cut" of consecution to, of all things, the clinamen of Lucretius:
"consecution may be less a methodology than a metaphysic; a miraculating agent; an instance of spirit or pneuma submerged in the world. In Lucretius, the force of composition is described as a clinamen—our world is born from a 'swerving of atoms in their fall from heaven. Such is the purpose served by Peru’s perpetual swerving, rhyming and recursion. Each consecutive swerve steps closer toward a total curvature, an arc that delimits the work as a world apart." Each Lishian sentence is its own world, its own monad, in which the universe of the story is contained without being merely represented. It's a mimesis beyond mimesis; the immanent transcendence of representation. The reader encounters the story as a sufficiency, as a world to be explored rather than as something presented. It's an essentially Modernist rather than postmodernist technique.
The Lishian "cut," the Lucretian "swerve": these are comfortably poetic concepts for me, reminiscent as they are of the volta or turn that is central to the operations of verse. The more-than-semantic, physical cut-in-language of the volta is what charges a poem with energy unsupplied by subject matter. Poems cannot completely evade subject matter; words never can. But they come much closer to such evasions, and can entangle a reader in themselves, with a more intensively minimal mimesis than can fiction. And this perhaps is why Yeats can say that poetry makes nothing happen but rather "survives, / A way of happening, a mouth."
Fiction is also a way of happening. And yet to be fiction, something has to happen. To write it, there has to be story. But there's a problem with the Lishian ontological sentence: it's too definitive and determinate. It says things.
A happening is an event. In a recent essay on "the novel as event," Cooper Levey-Baker seems to mean something less eventlike than the scene of events (way of happening): something like architecture or ambient music. Touchstones for his piece include an artwork by Anish Kapoor (creator of Chicago's beloved Bean, aka Cloud Gate) and the collaborations of filmmaker Béla Tarr and novelist László Krasznahorkai. Levey-Baker seems interested in recapturing a particular dimension of Modernism: the challenge to the reader or viewer to encounter the artwork (a film or a novel) so as to make its silence audible, often to the point of discomfort: the unpleasures of boredom. The very long shots without cuts in Tarr's film version of Krasznahorkai's Satantango are the equivalent of the novel's very long sentences, which endlessly defer answers to the audience's questions about what exactly is going on. As at a poetry reading, or leafing through one of Ashbery's longer works, one's mind wanders without ever losing the sense of being in the presence of something, an environment in which the figure-ground relation is rendered ambiguous, if not threatening.
Boredom, Levey-Baker claims, is the last refuge of the avant-garde, the one affect that cannot be recuperated by the entertainment-industrial complex. Long sentences, in their excessiveness, their accumulation and angular momentum, do not have to be boring; but they do tend to be far more open than short sentences. In their attenuated hypotaxis, the extension and interaction of dependent and independent clauses begin to overwrite each other, to introduce a dubiety, room for interpretation.
The past master of this is of course the Master himself, Henry James. Here's a sentence, chosen more or less at random, from The Golden Bowl: " He remembered to have read, as a boy, a wonderful tale by Allan Poe, his prospective wife's countryman—which was a thing to show, by the way, what imagination Americans COULD have: the story of the shipwrecked Gordon Pym, who, drifting in a small boat further toward the North Pole—or was it the South?—than anyone had ever done, found at a given moment before him a thickness of white air that was like a dazzling curtain of light, concealing as darkness conceals, yet of the colour of milk or of snow." This is not unstraightforward; and yet its dart backward toward an impugnation of the American imagination, its dart sideways into Poe, and its ambiguous image of the white mist of others' motivations (concealing the future of our hero) lend an astonishing multiplicity to the sentence's mimesis of what is supposedly happening in Prince Amerigo's mind. James is famous for his psychology, but thanks to his brother William's work we know how close psychology is to philosophy, which is to say the art of disclosing the real. Reality, as William James teaches us, is perspectival. The activity required of the reader of a Jamesian sentence sends her grasping in and through language for a meaning one cannot help but be conscious of creating.
James is also capable of Lishian sentence pairs, as in the following beautifully asymmetrical chiasmus: "He was taken seriously. Lost there in the white mist was the seriousness in them that made them so take him." The reader leaps from stone to stone. The cut is there. But it's the longer sentences that makes James James, and that suggest, for me, a possible fiction, an immanent mimesis, the paragraph-environment, story in language.
Thursday, December 12, 2013
The Recruit
One of my back-burner projects for the past couple of years is a memoir or a series of linked autobiographical essays about my years of quiet desperation trying to be a writer while living in New Orleans in the mid-90s. Green Mountains Review has just published some excerpts in their online edition.
Read them here.
Saturday, November 23, 2013
Fragment
What a pen can make: lines. The sea sees nothing. The computer heats up, rendering. What was given to Henry James: names. Makes a world.
They were neither of them saints. Him especially, but also especially, her. But what makes a saint? To have stood for something, and to have suffered for it. Isn't that enough? Isn't that, at least, something?
The artist chooses his constraints: that is his freedom. But the philosopher? Is she not obligated, simply, to the truth? And thus is the least free of all? The philosopher does not invent, even when she does invent: a voice, a character, a concept. The philosopher constructs a discourse, an elaborate machine for unearthing what she discovers in the day or night. She lives in the brilliant aftermath of intuition.
Wednesday, November 20, 2013
Moths
It is more important
that a proposition be interesting than that it be true.[1]
Begin again. In a new
spirit of pragmatism, asking not
why I am interested in vital materialism, in
modernist poetics, in the dialectic of innocence and experience, in the
phenomenological and ecological implications of taking language and the
imagination as things that obtain, that exist. Accepting that I am interested
in these things, that they are a matter of my temperament, its line or lines of
flight. Asking, instead, what this assemblage of interests can do.
The idea has come to
me that I want to do now is to saturate every atom. I mean to eliminate all
waste, deadness, superfluity: to give the moment whole; whatever it includes.[2]
In my own poetry this assemblage empowers a new practice, a practical poetics to be lived with and explored. Such a poetics undermines the impulse toward the made and returns one’s attention to making. To be always beginning again, with the reader, asking what it is in the moment that poems do.
Say that the moment is
a combination of thought; sensation; the voice of the sea.[3]
Poetry is a practice of magic, of incantation, “a matter of
disturbance, entrance and passion, rather than abracadabra.”[4] A
speech in which the speaker is fully embedded, fully committed. A voice
committed to the moment, to creating and being created by the otherness of what
the poem includes.
Waste, deadness, come
from the inclusion of things that don’t belong to the moment; this appalling
narrative business of the realist: getting on from lunch to dinner: it is
false, unreal, merely conventional.[5]
It is false, unreal, merely conventional: this business of
the realist: how some poetry and much scholarship encases and thwarts
experience. In their insistent proprieties they obscure our vision of the
actual, what William James called “pure experience.”[6]
The actual may be a poem; it may be the western black rhino, declared extinct
last week; it may be my daughter; it may be a feeling or a lure for feeling. We
lose the actual when we lose the adventure of imagination.
The world of wonders
is limited at last to the parent’s will (for will prospers where imagination is
thwarted); intellectual appetites become no more than ambitions; curious minds
become consciences; love, hatred, affection, and cruelty cease to be responses
and become convictions. And the adventure of life becomes a self-improvement
course.[7]
We can, in other words, know nothing in advance. The poem
lies before us. We are implicated if we write it, if we read it. We are willing
subjects in the wrong.
There is a stone chair
on a dais. Seeing it is the King’s chair or, even, in some dreamings of this
dream, finding myself a lonely king in that chair, there is no one rightly
there. A wave of fear seizes me. All things have gone wrong and I am in the
wrong. Great doors break from their bars and hinges, and, under pressure, a
wall of water floods the cavern.[8]
I am interested in noir.
In a noir narrative the protagonist,
who is usually some sort of detective, plunges confidently into the heart of an
expanding darkness, only to discover that the darkness is inside himself—that
he may even be its origin. This is the story of Oedipus and the story of Chinatown. Noir reverses the dialectic of innocence and experience. The
experienced detective is undone by his adventure, confronted with his own
complicity in evil. He detects himself. A terrible innocence is born. This
terrible moment, the moment at the very end of the noir narrative, is ours.
I discover myself on
the verge of the usual mistake.[9]
But we can bear in, imagining the darkness rather than
willing it.
Medicine can cure the
body. But soul, poetry, is capable of living in, longing for, choosing illness.
Only the most fanatic researcher upon cancer could share with the poet the
concept that cancer is a flower, an adventure, an intrigue with life.[10]
“Ecological politics has a noir form,” Timothy Morton writes. “We start by thinking we can
‘save’ something called ‘the world’ ‘over there,’ but end up realizing that we
ourselves are implicated. This is the solution to beautiful soul syndrome:
reframing our field of activity as one for which we ourselves are formally
responsible, even guilty.”[11]
We are or ought to be fanatic cancer researchers, and the cancer is in us. Is us. We are caught up in the
Anthropocene. We are caught up in an intrigue with life.
Why admit anything to
literature that is not poetry—by which I mean saturated? Is that not my grudge
against novelists? that they select nothing?[12]
I have written a novel called Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy. It is a sentimental title for a
narrative that struggles to emerge on the other side of sentimentality, as the
protagonist, in her struggle with the past that composes her, tries to survive
her own innocence of that past. The phrase “beautiful soul” is Hegelian (schöne Seele): “The beautiful soul maintains
a split between self and world, an irresolvable chasm created by the call of
conscience.... [it] cannot see that the evil it condemns is intrinsic to its
existence—indeed, its very form as pure subjectivity is this evil.”[13]
The poets succeeding
by simplifying: practically everything is left out.[14]
Poems are not mimetic; they do not represent; they show
nothing of states of affairs or states of mind. Poetry is the by-product of
what Karen Barad calls “intra-action,” “the
mutual constitution of entangled agencies… the notion of intra-action recognizes that distinct agencies do
not precede, but rather emerge through, their intra-action.”[15]
The poet is one agent entangled with innumerable other agents: black rhinos,
Congressional Republicans, tornadoes, John Keats, hay fever, words. The
particular moment of entanglement is the poet’s experience. The record of that
experience is the poem; liable, as Ezra Pound said of The Cantos, to carry “the defects inherent in a record of
struggle.”[16]
The poet’s role is not
to oppose evil, but to imagine it: what if Shakespeare had opposed Iago, or
Dostoyevsky opposed Raskolnikov—the vital thing is that they created Iago and Raskolnikov.[17]
The poem itself is not mimetic but the struggle to produce
it is microcosmic; as Whitehead says, “Each task of creation is a social
effort, employing the whole universe.” The defects of the poem mark its
suffering of incompatible facts. “Insistence on birth at the wrong season is
the trick of evil.” Whitehead follows this claim with a gimcrack theodicy,
assuring us that “in the advance of the world, particular evil facts are
finally transcended.”[18]
One can accept this only in the spirit of Kafka’s mordant remark that there is
plenty of hope for God, but not for us. Yet what Keats calls “the poetical
Character” must participate this hope if is not to be overwhelmed, or to
retreat to the guilty noncommitment of the beautiful soul.
...it is not itself—it
has no self—it is every thing and nothing—It has no character—it enjoys life
and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor,
mean or elevated—It has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen.[19]
Poetic practice is a pragmatism of impure subjectivity. The poem’s I
is embedded in, produces, and is produced by what it sees. “Environment” does
not exist. There is a vibration and an overlapping and a revision. The poem
ends, but the adventure does not. If the adventurer encounters evil, he tarries
with it and becomes it for a while. “This thing of darkness I / Acknowledge
mine.”[20]
That is his obedience to the struggle.
A Poet is the most
unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity—he is
continually in for—and filling some other Body—The Sun, the Moon, the Sea and
Men and Women who are creatures of impulse are poetical and have about them an
unchangeable attribute—the poet has none; no identity—he is certainly the most
unpoetical of all God’s Creatures.[21]
Keats is wrong about the unchangeable attributes of things,
since all things are themselves entangled and intra-acting agents. He is right
that a poet is willing to enter consciously and of his own free will into the
contract of intra-action that binds the rest of us all unwilling, since we are
blind to it. That blindness is what makes us poetical creatures of impulse. The
poet’s vision makes blindness palpable. What Duncan called, “a little
endarkenment.”[22]
I want to put
practically everything in: yet to saturate. That is what I want to do in “The
Moths.” It must include nonsense fact, sordidity: but made transparent.[23]
Moths are nocturnal insects, except when they are not. There
is nothing so strange nor seemingly nonsensical as the luna moth, which molts
five times in caterpillar form, eating the leaves of black walnut trees, until
finally cocooning and emerging with a wingspan of four and a half inches. The
luna moth has no mouth; its career as a gourmand is done. It lives for about a
week, flying only by night (unlike the diurnal sphinx moth, the infant moth,
the Panamanian tiger moth), the females releasing a chemical that attracts the
males to mate with them. Then they lay several hundred eggs, and then they die.
Moths are very common, except when they are not. Luna moths are endangered in
many areas due to pollution from herbicides and insectisides, as well as
habitat loss. Is this saturated? Is this transparent? Is the luna moth,
selected for the purposes of this essay very nearly at random, something with
which I am entangled in 2013, on the November night after a day of unseasonable
warmth and torrential rain, during which at least seventy-seven tornadoes
caused five reported deaths and untold property damage in the state of Illinois
where I live? The lives of moths are fantastically brief. Does this writing
bear the defects of a record of my struggle to imagine an order that is not an
illusion or bad faith but the order of intra-action, of noir, of innocence?
For she stood upon the
threshold of an art where she was to take her place with Ezra Pound and William
Carlos Williams in the adventure of the higher imagination, in the full risk of
the poem in which divine, human, and animal orders must be revealed.[24]
The lives of moths are fantastically brief.
Watching him, it
seemed as if a fibre, very thin but pure, of the enormous energy of the world
had been thrust into his frail and diminutive body.[25]
Innocence survives experience, through experience. The
innocence of the moth in its mouthless struggle for life. Of the poem.
Again, somehow, one
saw life, a pure bead.[26]
[1]
Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of
Ideas, pg. 244.
[2]
Virginia Woolf, diary entry of 28 September 1928.
[3]
Woolf, op. cit.
[4]
Robin Blaser quoted in Lisa Jarnot, Robert
Duncan: The Ambassador from Venus, pg. 165.
[5]
Woolf, op. cit.
[6]
William James, “Does ‘Consciousness’ Exist?” in Essays in Radical Empiricism, pg. 4.
[7]
Robert Duncan, “Pages from a Notebook,” A
Selected Prose, pg. 16.
[8]
Duncan, The H.D. Book, pg. 151.
[9]
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1855).
[10]
Duncan, “Pages from a Notebook,” A
Selected Prose, pg. 15.
[11]
Morton, Ecology without Nature, pg.
187.
[12]
Woolf, op. cit.
[13]
Morton, pg. 118.
[14]
Woolf, op. cit.
[15]
Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway,
pg. 33.
[16]
Pound, Guide to Kulchur, pg. 135.
[17]
Duncan, The Letters of Robert Duncan and
Denise Levertov, pg. 669.
[18]
Whitehead, Process and Reality, pg.
223.
[19]
John Keats, Selected Letters, pgs.
147-148
[20]
Shakespeare, The Tempest, 5.1.
[21]
Keats, pg. 148.
[22]
C.f. Stephen Collis and Graham Lyons, eds., Reading
Duncan Reading: Robert Duncan and the Poetics of Derivation, pg. 64.
[23]
Woolf, op. cit.
[24]
Duncan, The H.D. Book, pg. 210.
[25]
Woolf, “The Death of the Moth,” The Death
of the Moth and Other Essays, pg. 4.
[26]
Ibid, pg. 6.
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