Just to give this a context, I'm in the Mill--that delightful coffeehouse in the Haymarket in Lincoln--listening to a hipster discuss European politics with two Russian women and a man from Kosovo. Now, they're on to the drinking prowess of South Africans and Australians. Ah, and the hipster worked for Chuck Hegel as an intern. Wealth. Power. So much fun.
But now I'm going to talk about poetry. Zaidel's Neuropsychology of Art is making me happy, but it's hard to say how or why. Interesting case histories of artists with brain damage and what the effect of the damage was on their art. The brain is a fascinating place. Zaidel picks up both Dissanyake's concept of "making special" and Brown's list of human universals. She's arguing, in the early going, that as much as we are creatures of language, we are creatures of creativity and art. For a variety of reasons, she won't be covering writers, but she does recognize this as a field that needs to be explored.
And now the fire portion of the subject heading: I've just finished Jack Gilbert's The Great Fires. Fine, fine work. Tight pieces, fantastic attention to sound and structure (both in the individual poems and across the book). I'm drawn to how the emotional intensity is muted in its explicitness (though it slips out from time to time) but is carried by image and sudden, explosive metaphors that slip across the middle of the poem. For some reason, I'm thinking of Plath, though in her more narrative moments. And now I must put the death of Michiko behind me and move on to the next book. But I'll be coming back. So much to learn.
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