A Poet's Alphabet <continued>
D is for Dante, who has not influenced me, which is too bad. On
the other hand, I am not sure what the influence of Dante might be, and I would
think it quite strange to read somewhere that one of my contemporaries had
been influenced by him. How very grand, I would think. But death, being so
much more approachable - either here or just around the bend - has always been
an influence. What I mean to say is that death is common. If you are having a
good time and you conceive the possibility that the good time will end, then
you are concerned with death, though in a mild and unremarkable way. But what
I want to get to is something else: that death is the central concern of lyric
poetry. Lyric poetry reminds us that we live in time. It tells us that we are
mortal. It celebrates or recognizes moods, ideas, events only as they exist in
passing. For what meaning would anything have outside of time? Even when poetry
celebrates something joyful, it bears the news that the particular joy is over.
It is a long memorial, a valedictory to each discrete moment on earth. But its
power is at variance with what it celebrates. For it is not just that we mourn
the passage of time but that we are somehow isolated from the weight of time,
and when we read poems, during those brief moments of absorption, the thought
of death seems painless, even beautiful.
E is for endings, endings to poems, last words designed to
release us back into our world with the momentary illusion that no harm has
been done. They are various, and inscribe themselves in the ghostly aftermath
of any work or art. Much of what we love about poems, regardless of their
subject, is that they leave us with a sense of renewal, of more life. Life, on
the other hand, prepares us for nothing, and leaves us nowhere to go. It stops.
F is for fashion, literary fashion, which marks thee writing of
a period or an age, and which is virtually inescapable, as inescapable as its
sister Death. Even originality will be only what a period accepts as original,
which means that it has been anticipated to a certain extent by what it desires
to separate itself from. There is no way around it. And if we believe we are
oblivious to a contemporary style, we are only more likely to embody its
standards. And if we think to distance ourselves from current fashion by
finding another fashion from which to fashion ourselves, chances are it will be
the one that current fashion predicted we'd pick.
<To be continued....>
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☆╭╮ ╭╮■
∫╰╰﹏╯╯■ Sometimes...
﹡︱ ︱■
﹡╭˙。˙╮■ the goodness descends
＊╰ ﹍﹎ ╯■ without a name.
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