January 2009
5 posts
Meditation at Lagunitas
There’s a poem in the next post down. Let me try to explain what I like about it.
I like the wry awareness of the first two lines, the way the second undercuts the first. The move lets me think that the speaker is aware of the potential for overstatement in summing up “all the new thinking.”
The poem goes on to fulfill the promise of the first two lines: it takes an idea as...
And now a poem
Robert Hass
Meditation at Lagunitas
All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birch is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided light. Or the other...
“When that ineffable compound of depression, sadness (these two are not the...”
– Kingsley Amis describes the “metaphysical hangover” in “A Few Too Many” from The New Yorker.
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