[New-Poetry] Muldoon's Oxford lectures

[James Cervantes]

Yikes!  That £25 translates into $47 at the current rate of exchange.
It's hardback only, I take it?

- Jim

On 11/21/06, JforJames at aol.com <JforJames at aol.com> wrote:
>
>
> http://observer.guardian.co.uk/print/0,,329636514-102280,00.html
> The reason behind rhyme
> Paul Muldoon's Oxford lectures, The End of the Poem, offer a trenchant and
> clever analysis of the power of poetry, even finding space to salute Christ
> as a 'great punster', says Peter Conrad
>
> Peter Conrad
> Sunday November 19, 2006
>
> Observer
>
> The End of the Poem: Oxford Lectures
> by Paul Muldoon
> Faber £25, pp432
> Paul Muldoon's premonitory title does not mean what it seems to say: these
> lectures, delivered during his time as professor of poetry at Oxford, are
> far from being an obsequy for the art. Poems, if they are good, need never
> end. A poem, as Auden said when explaining how one was written, cannot be
> finished: it is simply abandoned by a poet who can add no more to it. The
> reader then takes over and, with luck, discovers another kind of
> endlessness: reading leads to rereading, as the words are coaxed into
> releasing subtler, richer meanings, dilating into ever ampler contexts.
>
> Unlike many of his predecessors, Muldoon chooses not to generalise about
> poetry. Instead, he explicates individual poems, one per lecture. The
> procedure demands close attention, but the results are revelatory. Reading
> here is a collaborative recreation and, at their best, Muldoon's
> interpretations - sometimes whimsically tenuous, often breathtaking in their
> intellectual boldness - are like improvised, free associating poems.
>
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>
>
>


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