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I recently saw a man on a construction site reading the Septology call out to a passing woman “hey yo, God is darkness, and that darkness, God's darkness , yes, that nothingness, yes, it shines, yes, it's from God's darkness that the light comes, the invisible light, hun”

DENNIS LEE in Thinking and Singing Ed. LILBURN ⁦Cormorant Books⁩ This is from Lee’s essay “Body Music.” The answer to the question “how live in the world” has a double answer. The first has a sarcastic edge, which is appropriate; the other is perhaps more, er, mystical?

DENISE LEVERTOV Breathing the Water ⁦New Directions⁩ This reminds me of Lee’s statement below. On one hand, the stream of images free of argument— just what is. The second half, erotic attention, meditative “telling and telling.” Water as paradigm of being’s difference.

NEW from Tom D’Evelyn

A classic of contemplation @Xylembooks “Knowledge is the generosity of being to the homeless mind,” p. 27.

😂

MARIE HOWE New and Selected ⁦W. W. Norton & Company⁩ A page from a sequence. The voice is both confessional and direct — no “postmodern” irony. It speaks with utter clarity of the unspeakable, not “rhetorically” but truthfully. By plumbing the sacred narrative the lyric redeems lyric.

CAROLINE BIRD The Air Year ⁦Carcanet Press⁩ The pulse of a poem line by line animates embodied voices (plural). Strong lines have a life of their own. Getting them right then arranging them can be anxious business. To bring “the deadness” alive took imagination and tact. Bravo!

SEAMUS HEANEY Some lyrics achieve a canonical status by simply exploring in a seemingly relaxed way the “ladder of lyric.” SH discovers in everyday language and process/progress the rungs of attention leading to “understanding.” The “O” of utter attention focuses the facts. Eros!

I must reread this ….

FANNY HOWE On the Ground 2004 ⁦Graywolf Press⁩ Basic grammar and history. Lyric often finds its “ground”—the metaphor that provide’s FH’s title— in the basic categories of what enables it. This reflexivity in the hands of FH proves more than clever. Mindful—if you will.

REVISED “Haiku”

ROBERT GRAY Rain Toward Morning. The opening stanza of a six-page meditation.

JAN ZWICKY Wisdom & Metaphor. As Perloff demonstrates in Wittgenstein’s Ladder, 20th century poetry shows the reach of W in lyric. JZ’s lifelong critical—loving—attention to W bore fruit in her work on metaphor, which confirms W by extending his relevance in a vital context.

Light distinguished all things with its grace. ⁦Anne L. Deneen⁩

WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA Poems New and Collected ⁦Ecco⁩ A “new” poem collected here. WS’s wit and wisdom delivered as it were under pressure. At the end of a long life, just what can we say being human is? What is selfhood? What do the biggest words say when we say them?

PAULA MEEHAN Dharmakaya 2002 W.F.U.P. The ferocious clarity and music of this reminded me of Yeats. Living with it, reading it aloud to myself, it’s more and more essential Meehan—that is it’s NOT by a canonical male master. To the contrary. Stunning!

AS I WAS SAYING A lot of Americans agree that Trump is a fine person and deserves to be their leader. But in light of lyric consciousness, Trump is an egomaniac, a deeply flawed human self. Their “choice” indicates that many people don’t see that. Lyric is inherently political.