[New-Poetry] looking for poems (and other writing) on "the idea"

[Michael Snider]

This has always seemd to me to be an epistemological poem, from Rosanna
Warren:


   Noon
   High summer. Plenitude. The granite knoll
   thrusts through gray soil at the hill crest. Drought:
   spring is fulfilled. I crouch on the warm skull
   of New Hampshire. Spikes of parched grass jut
   through the anthill at my feet, and the whole field
   grates with small oracles the cicadas
   scrape between thigh and wing. What do I hold
   at bay? The idea of harvest, days that ooze . . .
   From the valley rises the Interstate's purr,
   the whine of outboards from the lake, a child's voice
   quarreling. Someone's hammer raps the air,
   duet with its own knocked echo. Here is the precise
   dead heart of the living day, the hollow core, the pit
   around which light thickens, and we eat.


On Sat, May 2, 2009 at 5:38 PM, Chris Lott <chris at chrislott.org> wrote:

> Bob-- you may just be kidding, but I don't really dislike your
> poetics. In many ways I admire your project (to the extent I
> understand it), even if I think it's doooooomed...
>
> My only dislike it toward those who use attempts to create taxonomies
> to derive blindly from them valuey systems and hierarchies that are
> damaging and non-productive. But I lapse into that kind of thing
> sometimes myself, so it's hard for me to get too worked up about it.
>
> c
>
> On Sat, May 2, 2009 at 1:30 PM, Bob Grumman <bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net>
> wrote:
> > I'm as interested in your subject, which seems to me to be epistemology,
> as
> > I am in poetics, so have my theories that you will probably dislike as
> much
> > as you do my poetics, Chris, but I thought I'd pipe in that I believe in
> > innate concepts (which I call "urcepts") for circle, person, father, two
> and
> > so forth, so wonder if in your reading you've come across any speculation
> as
> > to the origins of a belief in ideas.  I particularly wonder what the
> first
> > idea might have been.
> >
> > Incidentally, thanks for simply mentioning your project--because it got
> me
> > thinking about the ideas we have that are not innate, and how, according
> to
> > my theory they are formed.  I think they're simply generalities.  An idea
> of
> > pig is simply all one's memories of pigs in a big clot with all the
> > differences between the pigs involved becoming effaced with time until
> all
> > that's left is a kind of pig-universal.  My newest thought is that the
> brain
> > tags such universals, but I can't figure out how it recognizes them as
> such
> > before tagging them.  Which has nothing to do with your project, just me
> > solipsissing away.
> >
> > Whee, Bob
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > New-Poetry mailing list
> > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
> >
>
> _______________________________________________
> New-Poetry mailing list
> New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090502/98cbbbfc/attachment.html