There is the knowledge which is a gathering of facts and another which is true subjectivity: if poetry has noetic ambition at all, it rests with the latter. You can read a poem without scrambling after comprehension; to do this, you must first defeat the sweet tooth for sense. You can read with erotic passivity, allowing yourself to be theurgically sculpted by musical force. Here narrative is less a muscle than music, than anaphora. Though I concede the intentions of poetry and contemplation fork, poetry still strikes me as a religious undertaking, whether it is written or read, because it is an attempt to listen inside things, an attempt to "hear" the interiority, the deeps, of crows and mountains of basaltic rock: as a result, it constantly edges toward ekstasis, a bewildering, somewhat destabilizing, yet vivifying exile from oneself. While most poets possess a substantial horde of ego, the act they perform of homesteading in otherness proves altruistic: if one of us travels into the cut off world of stones, rivers, then all of us do through the sort of reading which is anagogy. This means that poetry insofar as it is erotic, insofar as it is religious, following desire into things, listening in things, is political: one enters the sole trustworthy politics through a deepened subjectivity.
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Tim Lilburn
There is the knowledge which is a gathering of facts and another which is true subjectivity: if poetry has noetic ambition at all, it rests with the latter. You can read a poem without scrambling after comprehension; to do this, you must first defeat the sweet tooth for sense. You can read with erotic passivity, allowing yourself to be theurgically sculpted by musical force. Here narrative is less a muscle than music, than anaphora. Though I concede the intentions of poetry and contemplation fork, poetry still strikes me as a religious undertaking, whether it is written or read, because it is an attempt to listen inside things, an attempt to "hear" the interiority, the deeps, of crows and mountains of basaltic rock: as a result, it constantly edges toward ekstasis, a bewildering, somewhat destabilizing, yet vivifying exile from oneself. While most poets possess a substantial horde of ego, the act they perform of homesteading in otherness proves altruistic: if one of us travels into the cut off world of stones, rivers, then all of us do through the sort of reading which is anagogy. This means that poetry insofar as it is erotic, insofar as it is religious, following desire into things, listening in things, is political: one enters the sole trustworthy politics through a deepened subjectivity.
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