In other news, thanks to the latest HCE interviewee, Jonathan Minton, for his impressive online journal Word for /Word, which I was previously unaware of. (And he lives in Helena, Montana! I lived there for a year before moving to Missoula for grad school. Beautiful town, not a whole heck of a lot going on. I wonder what he's doing there?) Tremendously enthusaistic about the work I found there by Juliet Patterson, a poet previously unknown to me. Intelligent, intense lyricism with what I want to call a sheer qualitya thinness, a translucence. Still a sucker for the high lyric, for the sheerly beautifulI'm finding this in Cole Swensen's Goest, too (which I received in return for entering the New York/New England Contest Alice James Books runsa practice I wish more contests would imitate). I'm very interested in a socially engaged lyric right now, in discursivity and in creating an impact or a sense of "wroughtness" through syntax rather than the lapidary image. But I still have a strong love of the latter. A wish for "high" languagenot out of pretentiousness or a desire to isolate myself from the hoi polloi, but out of a wish for genuine dignity, a secular sacredness.
         The simplest act
remains immured
as within a thousand sealed
vessels in the blue volutes
of the morning sea, the rural
sea.
No comments:
Post a Comment