Poetry

[Corpsey]

 

[mixed_biscuits]

evenings are really difficult i find. what do you do with them? i personally cant read in them but if he can good luck to him.

Why don't you watch the football with the lads down your proximal pub?

 

[entertainment]

What you been reading by him?

I read the selected writings one with the cover luka didn't like. Want to say I liked the essays but I don't remember really anything so it must not have stuck.

 

[Benny B]

Waiting for my Valery book to come, I remembered I had Crusoe in the poems for the millennium anthology, I guess it's a sequence from his notebooks (maybe from the time he had stopped writing/publishing poetry)?

Anyway, amazing bit of writing. The most perfect explanation of how achieving a life of abundance and leisure inevitably leads to inaction and indifference - better to stay lean and hungry.

 

[Benny B]

"The notion that death should be the chief subject of reflection of the living, and their chief care, was born with luxury - with the acquisition of abundance.

Whence this odd question: Among the choice of useless things, which do we give our minds to?"

 

[Benny B]

It's bad enough for Crusoe who at least built up his life of luxury and stores of reserves for himself alone on his island through hard work (though once he achieved it, his past days of labour feel like the life of another person in his memory), but in a way it must be even worse for those who just inherit wealth and abundance of useless choice.

Cold comfort perhaps for the struggling artist but at least its something. The life of leisure leads to being dominated by "the prettiest things around us".

Can see how all this has been a big influence on @luka now anyway

 

[Benny B]

it's not that he couldn't write poetry in the usual fashion, but he just developed some scruple about it. so he stopped. i think he came up with the line i like that goes something like
the first line is from the gods, then you have to match it

"This skilfully contrived poetry is an art of the profound skeptic. It presupposes an extraordinary freedom with regard to the totality of our ideas and sensations. Graciously the gods give us the first line for nothing, but it is up to us to furnish a second that will harmonise with it and not be unworthy of its supernatural elder brother. All the resources of experience and of intelligence are hardly enough to make it comparable to the verse which came to us as a gift."

 

[Benny B]

Just dipping into this book, haven't given it my full attention yet, but I think you're right that the prose, in English at least, is more interesting than the poetry. Strange that he sort of talked himself out of writing poetry by his own brilliant insights into the poetic mind (especially Mallarmé it seems, who I've yet to read).

Still think cemetery by the sea is incredible, but looks like all the English translations of his poems, while impressive in places, make him read like Wordsworth or someone, which isn't quite right, (although there probably are some similarities between the two). I like the Spanish translations I've seen better mainly for that reason.

 

[Benny B]

valery is odd in that he decided he wanted his poetry to be entirely conscious. but poetry can't be written with the conscious mind.

Interesting to think about how Valéry's thoughts fit into this famous quote by Wordsworth:

‘Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity'

I think they're quite similar in a lot of ways - meditative, conscious, later heavily edited by the poet, confined to fairly strict poetic forms, but born of spontaneity.

I really like some of the freer prose poems in this collection like The Bath and As on the Shore of the Ocean, they translate really well.

 

[Benny B]