From: "Aristotelos" <Gulio-AT-sympatico.ca>
Subject: Re: Riders on the Storm
Date: Sat, 12 Jan 2002 16:21:28 -0800



>
> " I celebrate myself,
> And what I assume you shall assume,
> For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you."
>
> William Carlos williams decides to be a city and that City is Paterson

> where I grew up).
> The poet creates by taking on the wordly personna of something already
there
> and then gives it to us and we have it too. . .as if for the first time. .
> a storm, a falcon, a city. . . a mighty song, THERE (da).
>

You know how in the study of rhetoric what often is learnt is how to think
on your feet so to speak. It's a flash of wit, a seizing of the moment or
you just fade. Leaves of Grass is the American adventure in this way, always
in motion, advancing into the as yet unknow, always unique and a little wild
like a child crying. The "as yet unknowable" that was the America of
Emerson. Then there is the America of the overrated Stevens in his "The
Comedian as the Letter C". The America of Crispin, the "instrospective
voyager" who in constantly taking on a piece of new surrounding that severs
the old self is made new and strange. And "the, imagination, here, could not
evade, in poems of plums, the strict austerity of one vast, subjugating,
final tone." Crispin goes on under "the thunder storms of Yucatan" into "a
savage color," cutting a rough edge like that of a cracked window after an
accident, a baroque stone, or a quilt patched together from leftover
European memories that looks a  little funny -- not so smooth and fine.
Crispin dips his quill "in its indigenous dew, of an aesthetic tough,
diverse, untamed,/ Incredible to prudes, the mint of dirt,/ Green barbarism
turning paradigm." This is why America really lies in the north west, the
"polar-purple" where he places "the Artic moonlight" in front of him like a
schema that is  a light where the imagination does not flower into a ripe
poem and gives him the "blissful liaison,/ Between himself and his
enviroment." And that's why "Nota: man is the intelligence of his soil,/ The
sovereign Ghost. As such, the Socrates of snails, musician of pears,
principium and lex. Or "Nota: his soil is man's intelligence" when it is
bare, naked and exposed such as it would be while enseeing and enhearing,
abyss grounding. But Stevens being more poet of the quotidian and the
commonplace is not as Epic as Heidegger. The poem "The Comedian..." is a
satire of  idealist epic, not so much longing gazing at the future but
attentiveness for plucking the fruit of a moment that burns into an old
naked memory, sudden like lighting, blitz of words...

Gulio


> The Doors are good, but not that good.  Riding the storm ( or whateverf
else
> comes along), making interesting observations along the way. . .Truckin'.
> .What a long strange trip it's been. . . gratefully dead
>
> In a curmudgeonly mood,
>
> Allen
>
>
>
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