Message-ID: <alpine.NEB.2.20.1606291625490.18715@panix3.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.wvu.edu>, Wryting-L <WRYTING-L@listserv.wvu.edu>
Subject: poetics, note
Date: Wed, 29 Jun 2016 16:27:08 -0400 (EDT)
poetics, note http://www.alansondheim.org/bctrip1581.jpg "More to my taste was 'Osymandias,' in which Shelley took death and futility head-on and still managed to emerge with human dignity intact. And here was Whitman, page after page of him, tremulous with desire in the lilac-scented night. They were just doing their job, these poets, which is really the job of all of us--to keep applying coat upon coat of human passion and grandiosity to thre world around us, trying to cover up whatever it is that lies underneath." (Barbara Ehrenreich, Living with A Wild God, A Nonbeliever's Searh for the Truth about Everything, pp. 48-9.) Is there a job for poets, and would this be the job, or would it be in fact to uncover whatever's down there? And isn't what's down there what _is,_ that rhetoric, language, gesture, being itself, covers up? What can be done with something that resists _doing_? What is it, that what it is being called here, is uncalled-for? What are we writing, if not always already a _calling_?