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The Butterfly Affect |
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RD Savage
12/25-27/05 © 2005 |
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¹ last four lines echo lines in "The Woman," a poem by Denise Levertov It is the one in homespun
This poem and others by Denise Levertov are linked by Sandra
M. Gilbert to describe her complexity as a person, a woman, a poet
- "despite her reverence for those details of desire and domesticity
which manifest 'the authentic,' she often implies that the wife-mother
who is an artist, a woman who sees and says what she sees, can never be
wholly one with her life, for to see is to be set apart by the
imperatives of perception and expression." For some, love is about
finding the middle way - neither silent nor singing.you hunger for when you are lonesome; the one in crazy feathers dragging opal chains in dust wearies you wearies herself perhaps... But the one in homespun whom you want is weary too, wants to sit down beside you neither silent nor singing, in quietness. Alas, they are not two but one, pierce the flesh of one, the other halfway across the world, will shriek, her blood will run.... Denise Levertov, from her final interview conducted on October 27, 1997 (she died December 20, 1997) Does this desire to submerge the ego involve a kind of spiritual quest, whether explicitly religious or not? I think that's true, don't you? It's in the air. When I started writing explicitly Christian poems, I thought I'd lose part of my readership. But I haven't actually. I think interest in religion is a counterforce to the insane, rationalist optimism that surrounds the development of all this new technology. This optimism is a twentieth-century repeat of attitudes in the nineteenth century, when they thought that steam, electricity, and telephones were going to make for some kind of utopia. There's a lot of dependence on technology today, and a willful ignorance that it's messing up resources, may end up destroying life on this planet, and then we'll have to start over without it. Our ethical development does not match our technological development. This sense of spiritual hunger is something of a counterforce or unconscious reaction to all that technological euphoria. later Is prayer similar to poetic inspiration, in that you can't force it, but simply must wait and hope for it? But you do have to focus your attention. I was really amazed at how close the exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola were to a poet or novelist imagining a scene. You focus your attention on some particular aspect of the life of Christ. You try to compose that scene in your imagination, place yourself there. If it's the Via Dolorosa, you have to ask yourself, are you one of the disciples? Are you a passerby? Are you a spectator that likes to watch from the side, the way people used to watch hangings? You establish who you are and where you stand and then you look at what you see. She forged a middle path in modern poetry, marrying the hard, dry objective style of the Imagist poets with the music and metaphysical yearnings of figures such as T.S. Eliot. Like her mentor, William Carlos Williams, Levertov excelled at the direct presentation of the object, and yet she went further, endowing such objects with rich metaphorical significance. She is one of my favorite, respected poets. |