Lodovico's curious experiment and other poems
- UNCG Author/Contributor (non-UNCG co-authors, if there are any, appear on document)
- Harley Juneau Beal (Creator)
- Institution
- The University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG )
- Web Site: http://library.uncg.edu/
- Advisor
- Fred Chappell
Abstract: Most of the poems in this collection are written in the "abstract expressionist" mode. Since the "abstract expressionist" mode is the primary mode of hell in the present time, there will be no apology here for having written in it, whatever difficulties it may pose for the reader. Nothing is forbidden here, neither "rhyme and meter," nor archaic phrasings, nor images of sense and nonsense, nothing forbidden but death and direct meaning which in this mode are synonymous. What is known either by invention or discovery must lead to action not category. Historically this mode was born and its patterns set in reaction to both realism and romanticism, the previous modes of hell, and to the resulting modes of their calamitous interpenetration, modes which were, on the one hand, prone as a pancake and dead still like a photograph and, on the other, puffed up with moralisms like a corpse. Thus, both modes had reached their perfection as far as hell was concerned: a photograph of vision. The following poems and their speakers face death of one sort or another not life, life is whatever action is possible. With two or three exceptions they are not about anything in particular, but are instead groups of particular images, words, sounds, concepts juxtaposed and constellated to conjure meaning not express it.
Lodovico's curious experiment and other poems
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Created on 1/1/1977
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Additional Information
- Publication
- Thesis
- Language: English
- Date: 1977