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Jul. 1st, 2011 02:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
proximoception46. Reasons for Moving/Darker/The Sargentville Notebook
Mark Strand's first two collections plus some jottings. I was familiar with his anthology pieces, translations and the many anthologies he's edited, but had been put off reading him through by my sister, who tried to convince me a decade or so ago that he's the best poet ever, better than Shakespeare even. I read enough to dismiss that and gave up on him till now. And now that I've read these I'm worried about her - not her taste, because whatever, but because this guy sounds messed up. He looks like a smoothed Beckett, which may be part of his appeal, but also makes me wonder if stretched out people get enough nutriment to their happy gland.
His style is pretty great, and he's mastered a dream mode near the border between Bisjop's and Kafka's. He's good with his two key images, lungs and breathed on mirrors. Lungs are the center of you, are life, but also holes; art gives us the promise of seeing what we are, like a mirror, but the contingency of being on this side rather than thay means the closer we get in to see the more our very breath, the annihilating nothing of our lungs, both stops us from seeing clearly and also reminds us we're on this side forever, that the framed safety of that knowable version of us is for it, never us. We're unknowable unsafe unselves and we know it. Maybe he gets cheerier later? Reductiveness works in art when the artist doesn't see it that way, when it's conveyed with authority, but I like my art to work on this side of the mirror too. I'm only picky that way because I find that a lot of it does. This melancholist tradition is quite powerful, I can't deny it, but it's not a power that runs my appliances. And yes, Shelley's a founder, but he founded other things too.
Mark Strand's first two collections plus some jottings. I was familiar with his anthology pieces, translations and the many anthologies he's edited, but had been put off reading him through by my sister, who tried to convince me a decade or so ago that he's the best poet ever, better than Shakespeare even. I read enough to dismiss that and gave up on him till now. And now that I've read these I'm worried about her - not her taste, because whatever, but because this guy sounds messed up. He looks like a smoothed Beckett, which may be part of his appeal, but also makes me wonder if stretched out people get enough nutriment to their happy gland.
His style is pretty great, and he's mastered a dream mode near the border between Bisjop's and Kafka's. He's good with his two key images, lungs and breathed on mirrors. Lungs are the center of you, are life, but also holes; art gives us the promise of seeing what we are, like a mirror, but the contingency of being on this side rather than thay means the closer we get in to see the more our very breath, the annihilating nothing of our lungs, both stops us from seeing clearly and also reminds us we're on this side forever, that the framed safety of that knowable version of us is for it, never us. We're unknowable unsafe unselves and we know it. Maybe he gets cheerier later? Reductiveness works in art when the artist doesn't see it that way, when it's conveyed with authority, but I like my art to work on this side of the mirror too. I'm only picky that way because I find that a lot of it does. This melancholist tradition is quite powerful, I can't deny it, but it's not a power that runs my appliances. And yes, Shelley's a founder, but he founded other things too.
