by Sara Teasdale (1884-1933)
I am not yours, not lost in you,
Not lost, although I long to be
Lost as a candle lit at noon,
Lost as a snowflake in the sea.
You love me, and I find you still
A spirit beautiful and bright,
Yet I am I, who long to be
Lost as a light is lost in light.
Oh plunge me deep in love — put out
My senses, leave me deaf and blind,
Swept by the tempest of your love,
A taper in a rushing wind.
Lately, I have noticed that I am able to compose poetry more fluidly when I am riding a motorcycle or sailing. Unfortunately neither of these activities are conducive to writing. But the importance of capturing these fleeting thoughts reminds me of the story of Pilot Officer John Gillespie Magee, Jr., member of the RCAF No 412 squadron. The story goes he composed a poem while flying a Spitfire over Britain and fortunately wrote it down and then mailed it to his parents. Sadly, he was killed December 11th 1941 after a mid-air collision when his parachute failed to open:
Interesting observations from Marjorie Perloff in an essay titled After Language Poetry: Innovation and its Theoretical Discontents:
The OED reminds us that innovation was once synonymous with sedition and even treason. In 1561, Thomas Norton wrote in Calvin’s Institute, “It is the duty of private men to obey, and not to make innovation of states after their own will.” Richard Hooker in 1597 refers to a political pamphleteer as “an authour of suspicious innovation.” The great Jacobean dramatist John Webster speaks of “the hydra-headed multitude / That only gape for innovation” (1639), and in 1796, Edmund Burke refers to the French Revolution as “a revolt of innovation; and thereby, the very elements of society have been confounded and dissipated.”
Indeed, it was not until the late nineteenth century that innovation became perceived as something both good and necessary, the equivalent, in fact, of avant-garde, specifically of the great avant-gardes of the early century from Russian and Italian Futurism to Dada, Surrealism, and beyond. I cannot here trace the vagaries of the term, but it is important to see that, so far as our own poetry is concerned, the call for Making it New was the watchword of the Beats as of Black Mountain, of Concrete Poetry and Fluxus as of the New York School. At times in recent years, one wonders how long the drive to innovate can continue, especially when, as in the case of Sloan’s Moving Borders, fifty contemporary American women poets are placed under the “innovative” umbrella. Given these numbers, one wonders, who isn’t innovative? And how much longer can poets keep innovating without finding themselves inadvertently Making It Old?
The essay rambles and is tedious at points, but it does raise the significant question of how we accept and deny innovation. After an intense and sometimes furious pace of trying to help keep innovative ideas and product launches secure during the past few weeks, I have to say I am exhausted and excited at the same time — building a bridge between old/known and new/untested is at the heart of practicing security in the modern world of rapid “life-cycles”.
Imagine training for years on how to make things safe and then being dropped into territory unknown to anyone and asked to steer innovation. Do you draw upon your practiced routines, or start innovating, or both? And for how long do you need to stay friendly with innovation before you can turn the project over to groups who specialize in low-risk, high-return automation?
I used to work for Peter Feldstein in the mid 1990s to help him manage a computer lab for the arts. His work is top-notch and he’s the nicest guy you could ever work for, so it’s great to see him get some well-deserved media attention [1]. His Oxford Project, listed in the Yahoo! most popular news stories today [2], humanizes a part of the world that some people will never be exposed to; it is a brilliant ethnographic tool.
In the current phase of his project, Feldstein has added a new twist, thanks to the help of friend Stephen Bloom, an author and journalism professor at the University of Iowa. Based on interviews, Bloom has crafted short narratives that lend a confessional, poetic and unvarnished dimension to the lives in Feldstein’s then-and-now portraits.
Way to go Peter! I really like reviewing the photos and I wonder if facial recognition technology would accurately predict the changes.
[1] Examples of recent stories:
I expect to see it on the Colbert Report or Daily Show soon.
[2] The BBC has “related” links and other helpful segues on their news pages, but for some reason Yahoo! does not even suggest than there might be an official project website. BoingBoing had to be told by a reader that they should link to the project site, but at least they did so. All very strange, considering the basic concept of hyperlinking versus traditional text…