More Tidbits from Levertov

following my earlier comments on shifting the metaphorical landscape of reading from mining (linearity) to sowing (cyclical), I came across this quote in Levertov's "New and Selected essays" on the work of the poet:

"The poet is a farmer, one who tends the land of language and imagination and its creatures, who makes things grow, poem-things, story-things, not out of nowhere but out of the ground on which he walks." (46)

This of course shifts the action from receptive (reaping) to active (sowing, tending, growing), but, well, you know. She goes on...

"[The poet] is an antagonist - but to what? To the hostility of the environment, which, however, contains the elements that will nourish his crops. And in what sense? In the sense of the struggle to compose - not to impose order but to compose the passive elements into a harvest, to grow not tares, but wheat." (47)

given my own sense of moral vertigo, this speaks a kind of comfort, that tilling this soil potentially provides a moral strengthening, both against internal winter, and externally against injustice.

More goodies:
"When we fail to take into account contexts in examining works of literature, we are reflecting a similar failure prevalent in other spheres of life - a kind of parochialism which addresses symptoms not causes, or isolates a single cause from its interrelation with other causes. We can see this in medicine, in education, in the way social problems are addressed, and most of all in the way ecological disasters result from the disregard of the complex interdependence of all things." (66)

Where this hits most frustratingly home for me is in at least weekly meetings in which some aspect or other of low student achievement is ascribed to one oversimplified cause.

In reflecting on her tendency to read poetry that is rooted in the natural world, specifically that of her chosen home the Pacific Northwest (more on a realization this brought about later) and poetry that gives some evidence of spiritual wrestling, she writes:

"The fact that poems such as these (both those of homage to nature and of doubt and faith) are being written and are being read, and that there is indeed, in so many writers and readers, that "deep spiritual longing" Jorie Graham speaks of, seems to underscore the irrelevance to literature, for both reader and writer, of the kind of criticism currently prevalent in the academic world - criticism which treats works of art as if they were diagrams or merely means provided for the exercise of analysis, rather than what they are: testimonies of lived life, which is what writers have a vocation to give, and readers (including those who write) have a need to receive." (21)

Reminded me of the pedantic eisegesis I saw so much at Fuller (where most of it didn't even bother to be pedantic, I guess...too concerned with relevance) and in academic texts in general. Maybe we took the postmodern idea that "what you see depends on where you stand" a little too far, in that we're stuck with our predetermined ideas borrowed from whatever scholar we've hitched our wagon to (de Man, Baudrillard, Derrida, Zizek, Lacan, whoever) will be found in whatever text we examine, keeping us caught in tautological semantic prisons with a bit of arrogance thrown in for good measure (who the hell else understands Hegel but me?). Nowhere is it more evident that we've become disconnected from nature. Well, I guess there's downtown LA...but even there we have a few trees. Naw, academia takes the cake on this one, where nature exists as an a abstract postulate, trafficked as sign and open to constructivist illusions.