Where's that title from?









Altarwise by Owl-Light


I.

Altarwise by owl-light in the half-way house
The gentleman lay graveward with his furies;
Abaddon in the hangnail cracked from Adam,
And, from his fork, a dog among the fairies,
The atlas-eater with a jaw for news,
Bit out the mandrake with to-morrow's scream.
Then, penny-eyed, that gentleman of wounds,
Old cock from nowheres and the heaven's egg,
With bones unbuttoned to the half-way winds,
Hatched from the windy salvage on one leg,
Scraped at my cradle in a walking word
That night of time under the Christward shelter:
I am the long world's gentleman, he said,
And share my bed with Capricorn and Cancer.



-- Dylan Thomas

17 November 2008

I don't know who this guy is, but I guess I should find out

From this article in the New York Times:

"[Lewis] Hyde’s admirers often point out with awe (and his reviewers with frustration) that his books are all but impossible to summarize. Hyde doesn’t object to this assessment. He wrote The Gift because he could find no place where his own motivations for writing poetry were well articulated, but articulating them required a poet’s suggestiveness. “One thing I’ve always liked to read is the kind of literature you find in Jung and Freud, which combines personal anecdote, philosophy, mythology, dreams,” he told me in his Cambridge office last May. 'I like the way it jumps from one discursive realm to another.' His books exhibit this lively heterogeneity to an at-times dizzying extent; in the course of 12 pages in “The Gift,” Hyde hops from a discussion of a Pali Buddhist parable to Marx’s “Capital” to the Ford Pinto and then moves quickly on, in the next 3 pages, to Christmas, country-western music and the psychological fates of Vietnamese refugees in Southern California."

Yes! This is what I want to do in my poems, except without the country-western music and the Pinto.  (Or, maybe with the Pinto.  But definitely not the country-western music.) (Figuratively speaking.)  But with non-discursive realms included.

I know I've heard of Lewis Hyde, but until I read this article, I could not have told you, off the top of my head, who he is or what he writes.  Good article.  Time for another run to the library!









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