[New-Poetry] Allen Grossman wins 2009 Bollingen

[TheOldMole]

By Allen Grossman

Descartes' Loneliness

(Meditation Three)

Toward evening, the natural light becomes
Intelligent and answers, without demur:
/“Be assured! You are not alone. . . .”/
But in fact, toward evening, I am not
Convinced there /is/ any other except myself
To whom existence /necessarily/ pertains.
I also interrogate myself to discover
Whether I /myself/ possess any power
By which I can bring it about that I,
Who now am, shall exist another moment.

Because I am mostly a thinking thing
And because this precise question is
Only from that thoughtful part of myself,
If such a power did reside within me
I should, I am sure, be conscious of it. . . .
But I am conscious of no such power.
And yet, if I myself cannot be
The cause of that assurance, surely
It is necessary to conclude that
I am not alone in the world. There is

some other who is the cause of that idea.
But if, at last, no such other can be
found toward evening, do I really have
sufficient assurance of the existence
or of any other being at all? For,
after a most careful search, I have been
unable to discover the /ground/ of that
conviction – unless it be imagined a lonely
workman on a dizzy scaffold unfolds
a sign at evening and puts his mark to it.




jforjames at aol.com wrote:
> Not sure when this was announced but I just noticed it...
>
> http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/bollingen/winner.html
>
> The judges also said: "A distinguished teacher of poetics and 
> literature, Grossman has influenced three generations of American 
> writers. He has characterized the lyric poet as an individual who, 'by 
> means of this art, seeks to speak with the utmost seriousness about 
> the totality of what he experiences,' and Grossman himself has been 
> refreshingly restless in that pursuit. In /Descartes' Loneliness/, he 
> achieves a precarious balance between an aspirational vision and close 
> attention to the world at hand. The poems progress with comic flair, 
> dramatic inquiry, and, at times, rage, through remembrance toward 
> understanding. The figure they make is large and difficult, and the 
> results are wholly singular. Carrying a weight that is rare in 
> contemporary poetry, their music provides a deep-seated solace to 
> their stark sentence."
>
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-- 
Tad Richards
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