[New-Poetry] Heidegger and poetry

[David Bircumshaw]

> the more widely you read, in fact, the clearer it becomes that our 
> poetry has a distinctive metaphysics, a set of principles or 
> intuitions held in common by poets as different as Seamus Heaney, 
> Charles Simic, and Billy Collins.
I'm quite tickled by the notion of Seamus Heaney's muddy boots and Billy 
Collins' throwaway last cigarettes in company with Heidegger and 
metaphysics. Perhaps you could stretch a case for Simic, but it would 
have to be a pretty long-necked stretch.

Now if every poet was Celan I guess at least a case for a poetry of 
absent metaphysics could be mounted, and of ambiguous meetings with 
Heidegger and a Metaphysics of No-Metaphysics in a Teutonic wood, but 
otherwise I'd be prone to say that ours is predominantly an age of the 
poets of a consumer society, indeed, of consumerist poetry, snacking 
compulsively on its junk.

-- 

David Bircumshaw
Website and A Chide's Alphabet http://homepage.ntlworld.com/david.bircumshaw/
The Animal Subsides http://www.arrowheadpress.co.uk/books/animal.html