Creative Thought: December 2003 Archives

Damn! It occurs to me today that "Daddy" may be my dad and that I may be Sophocles. Still thinking.

I let my mind wander into this territory every so often . . . as a poet and as an American, from what literary line am I descended? I have no doubt that the lineage can be traced to Europe, then Rome, then Greece. That is, I am a Westerner. The fact that I studied English and American lit in college and all thru grad & post grad ought to tell me that I am misinformed by the American view of the modernist movement, i.e., Pound, Eliot, and their board of erudite directors--everybody appearing in those standard university anthologies of the late sixties and all through the seventies.

Truth is more like this: my taste was poisoned by New Critics, particularly a couple of them at Indiana University, who taught me dissection, Blake style. The antidote was one Professor Richard Klawitter: long hair, smiling eyes, Oshkosh. He taught me to hear, hear the living thing. Then Aristotle taught me this: it's all just material (potential) shaped by the human self (to being) . . . and I am back where I started: the self influenced by whom, by what?

I dearly love the forms. That makes me a child of Emily Dickinson? Great slabs of talk-talk absolutely knock me out. And that makes me a Whitman baby. Neither, or at least, academically broad and therefore irrelevant. Here are, I think, some relatives, distant or close: Auden, Ashbery, Roethke, Williams, James Tate. All male, all white, most of 'em dead. Hmm. And that makes me a historical imperative.

So, if anyone's listening, whose child are u?