Quiet Lives

Quiet Lives Synopsis

I have been much absorbed in David Cope's poetry as necessary continuation of tradition of lucid grounded sane objectivism in poetry following the visually solid practice of Charles Reznikoff & William Carlos Williams. Though the notions of 'objectivism' were common for many decades among U. S. poets, there is not a great body of direct-sighted "e;close to the nose"e; examples of poems that hit a certain ideal objectivist mark-"e;No ideas but in things"e; consisting of "e;minute particulars"e; in which "e;the natural object is always the adequate symbol"e;, works of language wherein "e;the mind is clamped down on objects"e;, and where these "e;Things are symbols of themselves. "e; The poets I named above specialized in this refined experiment, and Pound touched on the subject as did Zukofsky and Bunting, and lesser but inter- esting figures such as Marsden Hartley in his little known poetry , and more romantic writers such as D. H. Lawrence. In this area of phanopoeiac "e;focus,"e; the sketching of particulars by which a motif is recognizably significant, David Cope has made, by the beginning of his third decade, the largest body of such work that I know of among poets of his own generation. Allen Ginsberg Table of Contents Foreword, Allen Ginsberg. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . v THE STARS The Line-up. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . Empty Street . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 The River. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Down on the Farm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 The Storm. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 American Dream. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 . . . . . . . . . . Baseball. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 . . . . . . . . . . . . Crash. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 . Lunch Hour. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winter Camp. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Circle of Lights . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 . . . . . . . . . . GO Labor Day . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 . . . . . . . . . . . Peace. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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