Saturday, January 28, 2012

R.H. Barlow, "Mythological Episode"

O that frog or flower that stealthily
Snipped from the bone Black Tezcatlipoca's foot!


Trapped with his hands full of magic, what could he do
But wither a projected sun,
Drop two or three eternities into his purse unwrought,
And leave us to make sacrifices forever?

1 comment:

  1. Denise Levertov, "An Admonition," The Poet in the World:

    Form exists only *in* the content and language. The visual shape of a poem is not its form but a result of the notation of its form. Oh, not to quibble, it is true that the set forms exists abstractly, too; sonnet, sestina, etc., have their rules, and one can invent rules for new "forms" in this sense ad infinitum. But this is a rudimentary view. In fact--and not only in organic poetry and "free verse"--form is the total interactive functioning of content and language, including every contributing element. The form of a man is not that he has two legs, two arms, a head and body and no tail, but the sum of his anatomical, physiological, mental, textural, moral, motor, etc., structure. And the form of a poem comprises all the equivalent components you can think of.

    "Form is never more than the extension of content." At the Vancouver poetry conference this summer ('63) I proposed to Robert Creeley, the originator of this now famous formula, that it should be changed to read: "Form is never more than the *revelation* of content"--to which he agreed). . .

    We need a poetry not of *direct statement* but of *direct evocation*: a poetry of hieroglyphics, of embodiment, incarnation; in which the personages may be of myth or of Monday, no matter, if they are of the living imagination.

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