Keeping A Log - James Merrill

Log by James Merrill (1972)

Then when the flame forked like a sudden path

I gasped and stumbled, and was less.

Density pulsing upward, gauze of ash,

Dear light along the way to nothingness,

What could be made of you but light, and this?

***

‘In Merrill’s poem, the inevitable splitting of the self, the forking of the vital flame, diminishes the speaker thus reminded of his mortality. but the very bifurcation produces sudden illumination and even gaiety. (The poet can make light of the dilemma after all, and as soon as ‘upward’ suggests ‘up word,’ the word “Log” itself in retrospect breaks into two meanings, a journal entry and a piece of fuel. So it is that dark is made light – and ‘light’ becomes heavy, dense with implication’ (J. D. McClatchy and Stephen Yenser)

***

James Ingram Merrill was an American poet. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1977 for Divine Comedies. His poetry falls into two distinct bodies of work: the polished and formalist lyric poetry of his early career, and the epic narrative of occult communication with spirits and angels, titled The Changing Light at Sandover, which dominated his later career. Although most of his published work was poetry, he also wrote essays, fiction, and plays.

Comments

Philip Levine's Acid Rage - They Lion (lie and) Grow

THEY FEED THEY LION by Philip Levine (1968) Out of burlap sacks, out of bearing butter, Out of black bean and wet slate bread, Out of the acids of rage, the candor of tar, Out of creosote, gasoline, drive shafts, wooden dollies, They Lion grow. Out of the gray hills Of industrial barns, out of rain, out of bus ride, West Virginia to Kiss My Ass, out of buried aunties, Mothers hardening like pounded stumps, out of stumps, Out of the bones' need to sharpen and the muscles' to stretch, They Lion grow. Earth is eating trees, fence posts, Gutted cars, earth is calling in her little ones, "Come home, Come home!" From pig balls, From the ferocity of pig driven to holiness, From the furred ear and the full jowl come The repose of the hung belly, from the purpose They Lion grow. From the sweet glues of the trotters Come the sweet kinks of the fist, from the full flower Of the hams the thorax of caves, From "Bow

From Academy to the Street, From Poetry To Prose

From academy to the street, from poetry to prose - Nicanor Parra – ‘My own antipoems use this blank verse. I’ve often been asked what an antipoem is and the most frequent response I’ve given, without realising what I was saying is – “an antipoem is quite simple a dramatic utterance”, and a dramatic utterance, we would have to add, is a Shakespearean blank verse. Or rather, it is a hendecasyllable that lengthens and shortens, and that oscillates between the academy, the street and the fairground. I’ve always worked with these elements: I’ve even managed to combine verse with eleven syllables and one with one syllable, and verses with prose. I thought it was a great invention of mine, but the Elizabethans were already working with these methods – Shakespeare used them in King Lear , where a large percentage of the work is written in prose, without us fully knowing what is verse and what is prose. This is very important: we could say that they are prosaic verses, or poetic verse’

The Strange and Compelling Inner Life of Clarice Lispector

Dedication - Cuando a la casa del lenguaje se le vuela el tejado y las palabras no guarecen, yo hablo When the house of language has its roof blown off and words do not shelter, I speak - fellow Latin American writer and contemporary, Alejandra Pizarnik, "Fragmentos para dominar el silencio” (Fragments to overcome silence) --- “ALL THE WORLD BEGAN WITH A YES. ONE MOLECULE SAID YES TO ANOTHER MOLECULE and life was born. But before prehistory there was the prehistory of prehistory and there was the never and there was the yes. It was ever so. I don’t know why, but I do know that the universe never began. Make no mistake, I only achieve simplicity with enormous effort” - From The Hour Of The Star (1977) --- When I read Clarice, I’m reminded of Montaigne - "I continually observe myself, I take stock of myself, I taste myself … I roll about in myself” Maurice Merleau-Ponty described Montaigne as someone who put "a consciousness astonished

Aporetica

Search This Blog