Alfred Corn, As Far As The Eye Can See...

I'm listening to P.J.Harvey's new album 'White Chalk', sung in the voice of a 13-year old ghost.  Wow...

Now I'm reading Alfred Corn's 'Stake, Selected Poems 1972-1992'.  I'm enjoying the way his poems unroll like long, detailed tapestries which explore and celebrate the immediacy of his own self's experience of the world.  I like the way he weaves these immediate experiences together with threads of both personal and societal histories.  And I'm liking their open structure.  He seems to favour large blocks of blank verse and sometimes makes these blocks stand together in larger assemblages.  I like the expansiveness, the confidence of this.  It seems very American, taking its cue from Whitman, via Hart Crane, although it also feels like he's continuing in a Wordsworthian tradition - that kind of monastic, ruminatory quality, that sensible yet awed peering into the workings of memory and perception.  So to me it seems unBritish in the sense that, since Wordsworth, British poets seem to have shied away from writing in that ranging, expansive and visionary manner (huge generalisation here, but I feel there's an element of truth...)

If reading's a reconfiguring of one's own genetic material, am I discovering, via Alfred Corn, new ancestors?  Too early to tell.  It's certainly making me think about the limitations of the sonnet...

Christmas is over, thank God.  I'd had enough of my parents' inability to live without loud, constant television, and of the heat, which was there because my grandmother, now she's in her late eighties, has entered the tropical phase of her life and demands high temperatures at all times.  And the necessity to eat in vast quantities...  Think I was almost sweating trifle at one point...

Now I'm home, now listening to the New York band, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs...

Do we all re-examine our families at Christmas? 

Are all poets half orphan?

Any recommendations for poets I might make a new family tree with?!

tags: gay poet  poetry  poetics  poet  writing  

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