Proem

The Proem introduces several major themes of the book, including accuracy, error, nostalgia, and the arbitrary, via close readings of a number of poems, prominently ‘English: An Ode’ by Robert Hass, ‘Hedge School’ by Paul Muldoon, and ‘Nostalgia’ by Eavan Boland, as well as poems by Donald Davie, Tony Harrison, and Galway Kinnell. Noting that both etymology and poetry have a history of dubious association with notions of ‘truth’, the Proem proposes to investigate what kinds of truth may be carried or crafted by etymology in poetry, and by poetic etymology.

Travel and Turmoil

In 1964, Nell and Dilys left New York on the Queen Mary, bound for London. The next stop was Burton Bradstock in West Dorset, home of poet Howard Griffin, where Nell began painting garden views. The women spent time in Paris and Lisbon before flying to the Caribbean island of St. Lucia, where Nell’s dealer Elinor Poindexter and her husband owned a banana plantation. Nell delighted in the native plants and birds. She taught the teenaged son of their cook to read and write and enjoyed visits by Arthur Cohen, her major collector, and poet Galway Kinnell. But despite the lush surroundings, the eleven months on St. Lucia were plagued by inconveniences, from quarreling workmen to scorpions and torrential rains. Nell’s April 1966 Poindexter Gallery show, which included many works completed in St. Lucia, was well reviewed. Then came a great shock: in late May, Dilys suddenly moved out.

A Poem Is a Material Object: Claire Van Vliet’s Artists Books and Denise Levertov’s “Batterers”

A literary text is, for a book artist, like a score for a musician or a script for an actor: a basis on which to construct an artistic performance. Book artist Claire Van Vliet has, at her Janus Press, constructed dazzling broadsides and artist books based on poetry by, among others, Hayden Carruth, Galway Kinnell, and Margaret Kaufman. These works test or ignore boundaries between conventional categories such as book and broadside, two-dimensional display, and three-dimensional construction. The object she built based on Denise Levertov’s poem “Batterers” unfolds especially powerfully in time and three-dimensional space.

A Quality of Wonder

What place has poetry in the teaching or reflection of ethicists? Even poetry that has no obvious political edge can play an important role in refining a poetics of the will, where will is understood at once as the motive power of action and as the seat of both our freedom and our bondage. Poems by W. H. Auden, Anthony Hecht, Galway Kinnell, William Carols Williams, and others are examined against a background provided by the work of Erazim Kohák, H. Richard Niebuhr, and Paul Ricoeur. A poetics of the will requires attention to affirmation, beauty, and wonder, but also to concrete embodiment, full recognition of the complex reality of persons and situations, and mature resistance to the temptation to righteousness and the seduction of despair.