Negative Capability Poetics

Negative Capability Poetics
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Negative Capability

The idea being—
To apply Keats’
Negative Capability
To Sylvia Plath
____________

The way that—
John Berryman
Applied it to
Mistress Bradstreet
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The way that—
Susan Howe
Applied it to
Emily Dickinson
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The way that—
Jack Spicer
Applied it to
Federico Garcia Lorca
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Poets Working Together

“to meet the work
with writing”
—Susan Howe
Postmodern Poetry:
The Talisman Interviews
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She doesn’t trust writers—
She only trusts the story
And the place

The story & the place—
Tied together in strange
Mysterious, profound ways
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She trusts the story—
To form its own voice
Like Spicer “After Lorca”

To take Lorca & duende—
Outside his language and
Recast it somehow ours
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Like Howe reading to—
Rewrite Emily Dickinson
To Unwrite the Male Muse

It takes another poet—
To do the urgent task of
Undoing Johnson’s editions
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The actual physical act—
Of where the Line breaks
In Dickinson’s letter-poems

And Emily’s poem-letters—
The textual problems
With Harvard Lit Crit
__________

The way males treat Emily—
Her handwritten productions
Chauvistically manhandled

Instead Howe meets Emily—
Working thru writing not
Explaining or translating
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To meet Emily in time—
Not just place to place
But writer to writer

Mind to mind—
Friend to friend
And poet to poet
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Disintegrating Male Archives

Not to tribute Emily—
But meet her in tribute
“My Emily Dickinson”
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Nixon’s Archives—
Full of perpetual lies
And political ironies

The gaps & silences—
The erasures and the
Watergate cover-ups
____________

The same with the
Plath & Dickinson archives
Such stupid Male Lit Crit

What do we know—
What does anybody know
Who rules these Archives?
_________

Are Poets reliable?—
Is Poetry any more
Reliable than Prose Lit Crit?

Subversive Narratologies—
The politics and poetry
Of Plath and Dickinson
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Beginning with fragments—
Bits and pieces of a text
Ensorcelling the reader

Ensconced in euphoria—
Wordhorde weirding way
With Negative Capability
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Sunday 21 Dec. 1817
Hampstead Sunday
MY DEAR BROTHERS:
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What quality went to—
Form a Man of Achievement
Especially in Literature

I mean Negative Capability—
When a man is capable of
Being in uncertainties,
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Mysteries, doubts, without
Any irritable reaching after
Fact and reason (Coleridge)

Letting go by a fine isolated
Verisimilitude caught from the
Penetralium of mystery, being
_______________

Capable of remaining content
With half-knowledge. A poet
With this sense of Beauty

Overcomes every other
consideration, OBLITERATES
all other considerations