[New-Poetry] Declaring your doubt

[Halvard Johnson]

Oh, I don't know, David. Well . . . maybe.

Hal

"I don't know what music is."
   		--Ludvig van Beethoven

Halvard Johnson
================
halvard at earthlink.net
http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard/index.html
http://entropyandme.blogspot.com
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http://www.hamiltonstone.org
http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard/vidalocabooks.html


On Jul 2, 2007, at 9:14 AM, David Graham wrote:

> On Keats, uncertainty, etc., here's a passage from a recent essay  
> by David Kirby, the whole of which I also recommend:
>
> "Indeed, part of a great poem will be its enduring mystery. Keats  
> interrogates his urn mercilessly: Who are these figures depicted on  
> you? Are they human or divine? Where are they going? What are they  
> doing? He gets an answer—”‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty.’” Yet  
> it’s only a partial answer, for, as the urn says, “‘that is all /  
> Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’” In other words, shut  
> up: I, the urn, will tell you earthlings what you know already, and  
> the rest you’ll find out later, if at all.
>
> There’s a stack of recent poetry books by my desk. Almost at  
> random, they declare their doubt. In some cases, the titles  
> themselves give away the author’s air of uncertainty: There’s  
> Incomplete Knowledge by Jeffrey Harrison, as well as John  
> Gallaher’s The Little Book of Guesses. “Yesterday for you / I wrote  
> a poem so full / of lies it woke me”, writes Matthew Zapruder in  
> The Pajamist, and the first line of Paisley Rekdal’s “The Invention  
> of the Kaleidoscope” says simply, “I am going to fail.”
>
> Yet certainty and doubt are two sides of the same coin, and each of  
> these collections seems to begin in shadow just so it can work its  
> way into the light. If there’s a single quality common to all good  
> poems, it’s that each takes the reader on the full roller coaster  
> ride of idea and emotion, up the peaks and down the valleys. It  
> then drops the reader off at the starting point again, the same  
> person still, though changed."
> --David Kirby.  "Why, Poetry?"  The American Interest Online.  July/ 
> August 2007.
> http://the-american-interest.com/ai2/article.cfm?Id=300&MId=14
>
>
>
>
>
> ========================================
> David Graham
> grahamd at ripon.edu
>
> Home Page:
> http://web.mac.com/drjazz/iWeb/Site/About%20Me.html
>
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> ==========================================
>
>
>
> On Jul 2, 2007, at 9:07 AM, jforjames at aol.com wrote:
>
>> Jackson's quote is a good one...though it's like so many quotes  
>> that have some "certainty" in their saying.
>> He's framing the battle for poetry's soul as 'either/or' or 'zero  
>> sum' matter. That poetry can live with unceartainty
>> and indeterminancy should be pretty well established by now. It  
>> seems to me that's much the fashion
>> of poetry these days, particular post-avant poetry. Personally, I  
>> wouldn't want to avoid a poetry strove,
>> at times, for fixity and exactness. I think a poet is capable of  
>> finding the stil-point amid the welter.
>
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