The Significance of the Works Consulted List
I've been reading and reading and reading. And just when I thought I was ready to write, I went back to more reading. This is what I read while working on the critical thesis but it's not necessarily a bibliography as there wasn't always a direct relation between what I was reading and what I was writing
I read the following, in part or whole:
Why? Why so many books with so little writing in return? It was all I could do. I couldn't get contents of Fictive Certainties to come together and make sense in my head until I was able to explore so many different types of literature and knowledge. I don't know. I just couldn't process what I was reading in the essay "The Truth and Life of Myth" without going and exploring the "leads" the essay had developed in my thinking. It didn't just affect my poetry and my poetic aesthetic, it affected how I thought about everything.
It was the opening epigraph from Kathleen Raine: "In such cases myth is the truth of the fact, not the fact of the truth of the myth." I read that and I re-read the 7th Harry Potter shortly after. (I don't know why I was compelled to read HP. I think I wanted the brain break after all the poetry books.) And immediately I wondered what was the truth of the myth of Harry Potter. Is that lame? I don't think so. Duncan goes on to talk about a children's book his mother read to him from "Little Pictures of Japan" (10). He also talks about"The Land of Oz" in addition to headier myths, like King Lear and Ivanhoe (8-9). But the point is that he includes relatively modern myths generated by contemporary authors, and not some folklore passed along, into this myth representing some truth. I don't think we'll know what truth was represented in J. K. Rowling's mythical world but perhaps in the far future, the hindsight will provide something. But it isn't just the living proof of truth -- it's not that there is actually a school for wizards hidden in Scotland -- but that there's an existence, a way of living, that is outside of what we encounter daily and believe by reason. There's something more.
What does any of this have to do with the critical thesis I was supposed to be working on for the third semester project for school? Something. I will do my best to articulate precisely what in coming posts.
I've been reading and reading and reading. And just when I thought I was ready to write, I went back to more reading. This is what I read while working on the critical thesis but it's not necessarily a bibliography as there wasn't always a direct relation between what I was reading and what I was writing
I read the following, in part or whole:
- Sense and Sensibility
- Diary of Anais Nin
- Tropic of Cancer
- The Secret (I know, WTF, right?)
- The Gospel of Mary Magdalene
- Selected Poems of Ezra Pound
- I Am America and So Can You
- The End of America
- The Jefferson Bible
- Ezra Pound: An introduction to the poetry
- Contemporary American Poets: American Poetry Since 1940
- Literary Theory, an Introduction
- The Art of Reading Poetry
- Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
- Saline by Kimberley Lyons
- In Ex teriors Full on Jabber
- June edition of Poetry Magazine
- "Shakespeare" by Another Name
- The Poetics of Music
- February chap book
- The Opening of the Field
- Paris Spleen
- Fowlie's Complete Works of Rimbaud
- The Complete Poems and Selected Letter and Prose of Hart Crane
- Robin Hood
- The Water Babies
- D'aurlaire's Greek Mythology
- Cupid and Psyche
- The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, sections on Projective Verse & Contemporary American Poetry from Modernists to now
- The Poetics of Robert Duncan
- all a catalyst in one way or another by Fictive Certainties (actually the Poetics essay lead to Fictive Certainties which lead to all the other books)
Why? Why so many books with so little writing in return? It was all I could do. I couldn't get contents of Fictive Certainties to come together and make sense in my head until I was able to explore so many different types of literature and knowledge. I don't know. I just couldn't process what I was reading in the essay "The Truth and Life of Myth" without going and exploring the "leads" the essay had developed in my thinking. It didn't just affect my poetry and my poetic aesthetic, it affected how I thought about everything.
It was the opening epigraph from Kathleen Raine: "In such cases myth is the truth of the fact, not the fact of the truth of the myth." I read that and I re-read the 7th Harry Potter shortly after. (I don't know why I was compelled to read HP. I think I wanted the brain break after all the poetry books.) And immediately I wondered what was the truth of the myth of Harry Potter. Is that lame? I don't think so. Duncan goes on to talk about a children's book his mother read to him from "Little Pictures of Japan" (10). He also talks about"The Land of Oz" in addition to headier myths, like King Lear and Ivanhoe (8-9). But the point is that he includes relatively modern myths generated by contemporary authors, and not some folklore passed along, into this myth representing some truth. I don't think we'll know what truth was represented in J. K. Rowling's mythical world but perhaps in the far future, the hindsight will provide something. But it isn't just the living proof of truth -- it's not that there is actually a school for wizards hidden in Scotland -- but that there's an existence, a way of living, that is outside of what we encounter daily and believe by reason. There's something more.
What does any of this have to do with the critical thesis I was supposed to be working on for the third semester project for school? Something. I will do my best to articulate precisely what in coming posts.