[New-Poetry] bob's art for art's sake

[Suzanne Burns]

On 1/5/07, Skip Fox <skip at louisiana.edu> wrote:
>
>  Tangent: This past semester I got a chance to read Robinson Jeffers
> extensively. His views are close to those under discussion and his poetry is
> stunning.
>
Whooaaa, yes.  Now that I think of it, I need to get his collected works.
Like, NOW.

Hayden Carruth really loved Jeffers and assigned a lot of his poems in the
classes I took at SU.  He is known as an icon of the environmental
movement.

"A severed hand
Is an ugly thing and man dissevered from the earth and stars
and his history... for contemplation or in fact...
Often appears atrociously ugly. Integrity is wholeness,
the greatest beauty is
Organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty
of the universe. Love that, not man
Apart from that, or else you will share man's pitiful confusions,
or drown in despair when his days darken."

Or maybe:

"Why does insanity always twist the great answers? Because only tormented
persons want truth.
Man is an animal like other animals, wants food and success and women, not
truth. Only if the mind Tortured by some interior tension has despaired of
happiness: then it hates its life-cage and seeks further, And finds, if it
is powerful enough. But instantly the private agony that made the search
Muddles the finding. Then search for truth is foredoomed and frustrate? Only
stained fragments? Until the mind has turned its love from itself and man,
from parts to the whole."

Or my favorite quote:

"Pleasure is the carrot dangled to lead the ass to market; or the
precipice."


Suzanne
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