I wanted to draw some attention to this George Scialabba essay, Progress and Prejudice.
It’s a discursive, elegiac (nostalgic, really, but ‘elegiac’ sounds better, and there is an unspoken mournfulness in his particular nostalgia, so we may call it a sort of elegy) and looks at what formed his own idea of progress and the writers of the past, mostly those who regretted it, but also some who… I don’t know? Accepted it without too many regrets.
He puts a significant portion of the words in talking about Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End, which I read not so long ago. Scialabba put his finger on several things that passed me by until he brought them up, including the theological aspect of the novel.
AT THE MOVIES (this section’s titled was not boldface type) mimics title cards (I’m sure they have other uses, but I think of them as the title cards showing dialogue in silent movies).
There are classical references to the myth of Orpheus, Eurydice, and their trip to the underworld and also to Jean Cocteau (there is a ‘character’ named Heurtebise, after a character in a Cocteau film, but like much of this, I don’t know what the references are supposed to accomplish).
Overall, it’s not bad. The problem is that Anne Carson has done it all and generally done it better.
In terms of integrating classical myths into contemporarily relevant poetry, read Autobiography of Red.
For this conceit of films and title cards? Carson did a series of poems called TV Men (I particularly remember her TV Men: Artaud, utilizing the brilliant, tragic, mad figure of Antonin Artaud).
There is a running theme about death and (lack of) existence. Conceptual poetry seems almost invariably to be ontological poetry (sometime epistemological, but more often ontological) and this does implicitly ask the implied questions in that model and does so in a fashion that is interesting and well done. But neither interesting nor well done enough, I fear.
‘War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography.’ – Ambrose Bierce
Poetry calls to us, like wild geese
Did a collector of Symbolist paintings orchestrate this museum heist?
the coffee philosopher 