Jeffrey Pethybridge’s Striven, The Bright Treatise does something so many modernists have done before him: provide a reason for living created from the ghosts of the dead.
Whether the things dead are people, tradition, symbols, the environment, poetic forms or culture, modernists and Pethybridge show their significance, their beauty, their life even while standing amongst the gravestones.
I decided to create a collage poem formed from most of the poets read throughout the semester. I attempted to form a broad representation of the tensions felt between loss and despair and then eventual hope and recovery seen in so many of the poems we covered.
I made a Flipsnack of the poem and all the sources used within the poem. You can view it here, but I also included the poem below without the sources.
