Word: poetical
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Silk told stories, waxed poetic, cracked jokes. The Beanpot, he intoned in a slightly shaky tone, means two words: "tradition and emotion...
WASHINGTON--Four months after his election-day victory, Bill Clinton yesterday took the presidential oath of office, delivered a poetic inaugural address and paraded down Pennsylvania Avenue to his new residence at the White House...
Admittedly, A Gilded Lapse of Time does have its faults--Schnackenberg tends to run on in a poetic stream of consciousness, sometimes at the expense of coherence. It's easy to get lost in the flow of language. The attractive thing about this book is that getting lost is not such a bad thing--Schnackenberg's words sing with a lyric beauty independent of underlying meaning...
...title sequence of the book takes the reader through a tour of Dante's tomb. Schnackenberg's meditation on the poet becomes a lament for the loss of a great poetic tradition. The speaker grieves that "no one will ever bother to cast again" the stunning images he created. The tone becomes less pessimistic as Schnackenberg begins to blur the lines between past and present: "There is a flood remnant...As if the Samaritan woman's water jar/Had been hurled against the wall, and was still dripping...Or it may be only a freshly washed floor/ Whose little lakes...
...excused from most occasions." This kind of praise for childhood as innocence, of course, is only possible for those who have left it entirely behind--if you really are too little to understand, you don't know what (sorrows) you're missing. If there is hope of poetic continuance in Ashbery's cosmology, it is in another, more plausible vision of childhood regained, a vision of childlikeness as a triumph of education. Surely the most hopeful parts of this new book are the poems dominated, not by journeys, parties or cities, but by pedagogy. In poems that begin as mock...