More from Poetry Feb 1965

I was reading a Wieners biographical essay that I printed off from some literary database of some sort and there was a quote from Denise Levertov about "Ace of Pentacles" to which I said to myself, "Self, don't you have the original from which this quote came?" And yes, I do have Poetry Feb 1965. Here's another gem to add to the previous one:

"[Wieners] working of poems is towards accuracy of notation for that experience, not in support of the superficial clarity that is only a compulsive neatness and takes insufficient care of the complexities of the live material." Poetry, Feb 1965, p. 327

Yup yup. Weirdly enough, she goes on to say she doesn't usually like that (dig at Duncan? were they fighting by then or still friends? do I really give a shit? no, not really; moving along) but does like it when it comes to Wieners.

More, "...but the peculiarities of language in these poems are, I have come to see, often the very crises of poignant truth, the pivots of the poem. They are not carelessness, just the contrary; change them and you change a note of a chord...It may seem 'anachronistic,' as one bewildered reader complained to me;"-- [note: that person sounds like someone who could have been one of my profs in grad school, the bad ones, that is] -- "but it is ourely functional in its own context..."