A Hybrid Ars Poetica: Levertov’s Musicality Meets Nelson’s Interiority Nelson offers in her conclusion to “Confessional Poetry” a lens through which one should examine the poets who belong to the school: Withdrawing into privacy to conduct a conversation with oneself is one of the most powerful images of autonomy that we have. The freedom of […]
Author Archive | Stef
Lateness and Liminality
This week’s reading of the New York School’s poetry reminded me of when Ben Hutchinson quoted the Icelandic poet, Jóhann Jónsson’s 1925 proclamation, We have been epigones since the age of the sagas. Epigones of our forefathers to one half, epigones of foreign artists to the other half. … Thus, we have with time become like […]
Denise Levertov’s “Some Notes on Organic Form”
Denise Levertov in “Some Notes on Organic Form” sets out to identify and define some of the key characteristics and/or processes of “organic form poetry.” She based her discussion upon Gerard Hanley Hopkins’ coining of the terms “inscape” and “instress” as referentials to sensory perception: to denote intrinsic form, the pattern of essential characteristics both […]
Hey Jack Kerouac, Set the record straight. Ginsberg’s “Sunflower Sutra” sounds more like Montale than Blake.
This post discusses the intertextuality between Ginsberg’s “Sunflower Sutra” and Montale’s “Portami il girasole, (Bring me the Sunflower).” It aims to illustrate how the latter could be a source for the former. While the poems are published at a distance of three decades (Montale’s in 1925 and Ginsberg’s in 1955), they both draw upon the […]