The poet stands to lose everything.
The poet against the world, against theory, law and history; not against history, but one step ahead of it. She is not for or against "people", but is for this particular person.
In the world we know, or think we know,the meaning of words like 'friendship' and 'absence' somehow gets lost in translation, which is another way of saying when the distance between two people grows there is only silence. But when we dream, there is another silence, full of understanding...
Every generalization is an image that the poet will break, only to create another, more transient one, like a shape-shifting fire or the moon's light passing over high tree tops.
'And dreams. For months there have been dreams like nothing before: moist and busy and distant, full of yielding curves, frantic pistons, warmth and a great falling; and you have awakened through fluttering lids to a rush and a gush and a toe-curling scalp-snapping jolt of a feeling from an inside deeper than you knew you had, spasms of a deep sweet hurt, the streetlights though your window blinds cracking into sharp stars against the black bedroom ceiling,..'
--DFW
I can't read writing like this, can't stand the idea of being swept away by words. The false note of lyricism grates on your nerves and in the final analysis it comes across as the writing of a precocious, self-obsessed kid.
Something is drawing you to give up on reading altogether. There's nothing worse than the fake intelligence of writer and reader.
'“Forgiven” is not the right word. I think its lyricism has been accepted and understood in the context of the book.'
---James Salter
The poet is against the world but he is for the world as well, at least for a different world that exists not just in the hopes of a generation or in an individual's imagination. He is 'for' the world that has always existed, the acts of kindness, generosity, the restraint and the enlarged vision, the wider sympathies that prevent the world from collapsing into pure nothingness.
War, you feel, is not just the disruption of 'experience'; it is the very antithesis of it. Which is why it must be refashioned years later into a story, a poem, a film. Collective cultural memory, institutions of all shapes and sizes, and individual testaments will do their best to reconstitute and refashion a narrative, tie the threads together, make sense of the great trenches in our minds, eke out some sense, fathom some line of causality, of sin or loss or frailty or heroism against the familiar backdrop of the human condition.
This frenzied lust for blood must form no part of our nature, must say nothing about Man (and in particular, about man).
Lest we forget. Lest we forget what?
The poet against the world, against theory, law and history; not against history, but one step ahead of it. She is not for or against "people", but is for this particular person.
In the world we know, or think we know,the meaning of words like 'friendship' and 'absence' somehow gets lost in translation, which is another way of saying when the distance between two people grows there is only silence. But when we dream, there is another silence, full of understanding...
Every generalization is an image that the poet will break, only to create another, more transient one, like a shape-shifting fire or the moon's light passing over high tree tops.
'And dreams. For months there have been dreams like nothing before: moist and busy and distant, full of yielding curves, frantic pistons, warmth and a great falling; and you have awakened through fluttering lids to a rush and a gush and a toe-curling scalp-snapping jolt of a feeling from an inside deeper than you knew you had, spasms of a deep sweet hurt, the streetlights though your window blinds cracking into sharp stars against the black bedroom ceiling,..'
--DFW
I can't read writing like this, can't stand the idea of being swept away by words. The false note of lyricism grates on your nerves and in the final analysis it comes across as the writing of a precocious, self-obsessed kid.
Something is drawing you to give up on reading altogether. There's nothing worse than the fake intelligence of writer and reader.
'“Forgiven” is not the right word. I think its lyricism has been accepted and understood in the context of the book.'
---James Salter
The poet is against the world but he is for the world as well, at least for a different world that exists not just in the hopes of a generation or in an individual's imagination. He is 'for' the world that has always existed, the acts of kindness, generosity, the restraint and the enlarged vision, the wider sympathies that prevent the world from collapsing into pure nothingness.
War, you feel, is not just the disruption of 'experience'; it is the very antithesis of it. Which is why it must be refashioned years later into a story, a poem, a film. Collective cultural memory, institutions of all shapes and sizes, and individual testaments will do their best to reconstitute and refashion a narrative, tie the threads together, make sense of the great trenches in our minds, eke out some sense, fathom some line of causality, of sin or loss or frailty or heroism against the familiar backdrop of the human condition.
This frenzied lust for blood must form no part of our nature, must say nothing about Man (and in particular, about man).
Lest we forget. Lest we forget what?
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