For Teachers of Poetry

[intertext]

This is one of those quote-within-a-quote-within-a-quote things that happen in blogs.

Litlove, in a post for the Sunday Salon is writing about reading Rilke's Duino Elegies.

This post on its own is worth reading, as she captures vividly the ecstacy of reading Rilke (and I have lidocafe to thank that I am now in the company of those who share that ecstacy).

But I particularly loved this quote from the critic William Gass, writing about Rilke:

The poet, while composing, struggles to rule a nation of greedy self-serving malcontents; every idea, however tangential to the main theme it may have been initially, wants to submerge the central subject beneath its fructifying self as though each drizzle were scheming a forty-days rain; every jig and trot desires to be the whole dance; every la-di-da and line length, image, order, rhyme, variation and refrain, every well-mouthed vowel, dental click, silent design, represents a corporation, cartel, union, well-heeled lobby, a Pentagon or NRA, eager to turn the law towards its interests; every word wants to enjoy a potency so supreme it will emasculate the others.

That is why I read. That is why I teach.

Comments

[tree_and_leaf]

Thank you for the link! I adore Rilke, and the whole post is very interesting. And the quote is dead right...

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

That's a marvelous quote. The pleasure William Glass must have had writing it--and the pleasure of the thought he's conveying--elicit an answering pleasure in the reader! I was laughing :-)

[marri.livejournal.com]

That's a great quote, and so true - applicable to every textual act of creation.

I might have to look myself up some Rilke.

[wordweaverlynn.livejournal.com]

Rilke is one of my favorites. I first heard of him through Roger Zelazny's lovely A Rose for Ecclesiastes (http://www.lib.ru/ZELQZNY/ARoseforEcclesiastes.txt), which I first read when I was 13 or so. That sent me haring off looking for the poems, and I fell in love.