Reading intro to 'Letters to Anais Nin' [Henry Miller] instead of Duncan right
now. [Taking a break, I guess...] [There's a] Nin quote that goes with [things I've read from] Duncan:
"the power of re-creation to lie in the sensibilities rather than in the memory
or critical intellectual perception" because of the polished & the process-less-ness that Duncan is described to be w/o in the Poetics essay[Poetics of RD by Dennis Cooley]. Not a synthesis. Instead, a group of splotches on purpose. When Nin tried to write novels they were flat. With her diary she learned "how to capture the living moments...that often withered in formal work." I feel this way about my attempts at fiction [and even creative non-fiction]. There is never "the immediate present, the warm, the near, being written at white heat..."
But with poetry? Yes, I feel the white heat.
I think that those observations of Nin's goes along with defining the "energy" of a work of writing: energy="the immediate present, the warm, the near, being written at white heat."