[New-Poetry] Poems by Others: Robinson Jeffers

[Suzanne Baran]

Suzanne,

Is there any place I can view your work or writing?
I really love reading your responses, you possess a great fluid writing
style.

--Suzanne

On 1/5/07, Suzanne Burns <queenmouse at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> On 1/5/07, Jeff Newberry <jeff.newberry at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Jim Finnegan said: "It's not the ocean but that big brain in the bone
> > vault that makes beauty."
> >
> > Perhaps, but that's not what Jeffers believed.  Good point, though.
> >
>
>
> I am not so sure that he would disagree necessarily-- I think he might
> agree that "beauty" is a concept that humans have developed  and applied to
> things they find aesthetically pleasing, and that the concept is objectively
> irrelevant to the thing itself, and probably an imposition.
>
> The ocean is simply itself.  The rat, the hawk, the cobra are simply what
> they are, and their beauty and vitality belongs completely to themselves--
> what they are *to us* is just not important.
>
> I think he would also add that they are   worthier than we are because
> they have done less harm, and that we should take ourselves and our concepts
> of beauty and perfection on a long walk off a short pier. After all where
> have our desires and tastes taken this planet?  How do we reconcile our
> longing for beauty as we look at the ocean with the fact that the Pacific
> has a big raft of plastic garbage floating around in it because of our
> consumer-driven ( i.e., desire-driven) wastefulness?
>
> Of course this is all just hair splitting.  I just love Jeffers.
>
> Another fine environmental poet to read is W.S. Merwin of course.  I
> should dig up his poem about the pineapples.
>
>
> Suzanne Burns
>
>
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>


-- 
"The reader, the thinker, the flaneur, are types of illuminati just as much
as the opium eater, the dreamer, the ecstatic. … Not to mention that most
terrible drug - ourselves - which we take in solitude."  - Walter Benjamin
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