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_? _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
