I have been reading too much lately, I think.
And watching too much.
I liked Lars and the Real Girl. It was more than a little cutesy and "movie-ish" but with Ryan Gosling to watch I won't complain.
But he looks like a lost Arquette.
A misplaced Arquette. Could it be the Arquette family set him down in some bulrushes a few decades ago?
I've been really enjoying this Rachel Blau-DuPlessis book (her latest installment of Drafts) and I want to talk about it, but not glibly...it would take multiple blog entries...the poems really deserve treatment as individual works...
I'm really impressed by how viable her post-lyricism is.
It's rather ensorceling, once a poet really establishes a dialectic of that order, to watch the evolution. When a life is spent in careful critical assessment of a chosen medium of expression, and then the artist who is living this life is able to do the sort of phenomenological reductions of both the engendering culture and the prismatic or filtering art at the same time, one gets to experience something deeply engaging.
It's rather like getting to see a wizard or sorceress dismantle herself through "rough magic"...by dismantling (or deconstructing) the means by which she or he has created their identity.
I think we see this process in the greatest poets...they eventually turn on themselves and their art.
It's not cruelty. It's almost a principle of magic, or of the magic of the art.
I see this process occurring in Blau-DuPlessis's latest book.
Maybe it's a form of lysis.
Think Shakespeare's Tempest or Rimbaud's abjuration in A Season in Hell.
Even in Wallace Stevens, there is a beautiful suite of austere poems at the end of his life which follow poems that have already begun the work of dismantling.
It's strange, this endgame.
But always compelling.
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