::10/05/2009 :: Standing in a Meadow ::
Nate Pritts via The Incliner blog:
Robert Duncan’s work hit me square in the head but left me with an ache in my heart. The first poem in his book The Opening of the Field is “Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow,” a breathless rush of a poem that, to me, seems spoken directly from the brain without the muddying influence of a mouth. Where Coleridge seemed always to need to mediate his impulses & ideas & big concepts through some kind of physical, objective articulation, Duncan had the bravery (it seemed brave to me when I first read it & still does now) to simply & directly & powerfully assert his thoughts as important enough to carry the poem:
as if it were a scene made-up by the mind,
that is not mine, but is a made place,
that is mine, it is so near to the heart,
an eternal pasture folded in all thought […]
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