proximoception: (Default)
proximoception ([personal profile] proximoception) wrote2008-12-09 02:31 pm

(no subject)

I'll be returning to it shortly for paper #2, but it's been nice going over The Auroras of Autumn time and time again, rubbing out the opacities, connecting in all the stray details, getting the whole structure into my head at once, like I did with Trumph a few years ago, and a bit like reading Adonais line by line to Julie after Rome and explaining everything. With the Bishop poems, too. It's the rarest privilege when the more closely you approach something the more it gives you. Term paper writing is often intolerable, but I always love the slow, thorough rereading, while telling myself it doesn't count as procrastinating.

[identity profile] grashupfer.livejournal.com 2008-12-09 08:15 pm (UTC)(link)
and a bit like reading Adonais line by line to Julie after Rome

This is suggestive enough as a sentence, but I'd love to read this short story...

[identity profile] proximoception.livejournal.com 2008-12-10 12:23 am (UTC)(link)
Heh! It's nothing much, she just showed her first real glimmer of interest in Shelley after experiencing the cemetery. So I read her Adonais one day and explained various things it alluded to. She listened respectfully--she mistrusts poetry because she's never sure when she's missing the point.

[identity profile] nightspore.livejournal.com 2008-12-10 04:39 am (UTC)(link)
Yeah -- for me it was: Upstairs the windows will be lighted, not the rooms. The necklace is a carving, not a kiss. The warm (!) hands are a motion, not a touch. Especially The necklace is a carving, not a kiss.

[identity profile] proximoception.livejournal.com 2008-12-10 12:14 pm (UTC)(link)
Soft hands. I'm coming to love all of it, but maybe the first half of 6 in particular. And am most taken by this in Ordinary Evening so far:

One part
Held fast tenaciously in common earth

And one from central earth to central sky
And in moonlit extensions of them in the mind
Searched out such majesty as it could find.


Not much you can add to that.

[identity profile] nightspore.livejournal.com 2008-12-10 12:32 pm (UTC)(link)
Strutting on his stem.

reading paragraphs / On the sublime

[identity profile] thelican.livejournal.com 2008-12-10 01:50 pm (UTC)(link)
it's the rarest privilege when the more closely you approach something the more it gives you.

Well put.