Duncan to Olson
9/25/08, comments: "Conceal the source and nature of the actual content"--this goes along with the Mallarme symbol, mystery and abstraction quote. How naming a thing suppresses three fourth the pleasure.
Duplicity is an important word, too. While I'm close reading "Just Seeing" I notice that there's a repetition of words and when they're repeated, the meaning is twisted. Just the parts of speech changing when used later in the poem, show the "duplicity" explicitly. I don't think that would be conscious. I think that would be because Duncan just knew words so innately and could intone a poem with repetition but with a twist on the repeated words because he practiced, because he was a writer.
Anyway, it's interesting to read one quote from one poet and a quote from another and see the connexions between them. And also to read the quote of a poet's letter and be able to recall an example of that in practice, that is, in the poem.
If as Flaubert has it "A Simple Heart": simple means single track, in a sense--and there is a duplicity not an ambiguity. What one reads is the unwitting verity reveald in the helpless effort to conceal the source and nature of the actual content.
9/25/08, comments: "Conceal the source and nature of the actual content"--this goes along with the Mallarme symbol, mystery and abstraction quote. How naming a thing suppresses three fourth the pleasure.
Duplicity is an important word, too. While I'm close reading "Just Seeing" I notice that there's a repetition of words and when they're repeated, the meaning is twisted. Just the parts of speech changing when used later in the poem, show the "duplicity" explicitly. I don't think that would be conscious. I think that would be because Duncan just knew words so innately and could intone a poem with repetition but with a twist on the repeated words because he practiced, because he was a writer.
Anyway, it's interesting to read one quote from one poet and a quote from another and see the connexions between them. And also to read the quote of a poet's letter and be able to recall an example of that in practice, that is, in the poem.