Reconfiguring Romanticism (26): Jeffrey C. Robinson, Spliced Romanticisms

Link words from the famous Romantic Poets to our bardic contemporaries in more-or-less chance correspondences.

WHITE SIMPLICITY

This pleasant tale is
What is “there is”
Ghost and jealous mother
A Poet’s death
Fruit ripening in stillness
The peach teaches thuds

(John Keats, Lyn Hejinian)

.

A man
worn
down by sickness:

Therefore we
build
and
build

(William Wordsworth, Paul Celan)

.

Spinning still
I let the incense grow cold
giving my body giving
idle since getting up
bedcovers tumbled
neglect / neglect
spinning still
the rapid line of motion
the curtains down in the sun
earth rolling with visible motion
my body emaciated a prisoner
neglected endless staring
sweeping through the darkness
cliffs wheeling by me

(William Wordsworth, Li Ch’ing Chao)

.

along the silver of a morning raga
this dull and clodded earth
over inner structure of the Human Thing
touch ethereal along the river Rio Grande

(John Keats, Ed Dorn)

.

1.
holding
light with
shade
kill or cure
no irritable
reaching
America
get real

(John Keats, Anne Waldman)

.

rivulets and beauty born murmuring
her face / but who is she / who
the hook / moving in water
peeling onions / in glade and bower
I sit with her on this calm heath
a Lady of my own / who is she
something is moving

(William Wordsworth, Lucille Clifton)

.

trapped in a box of colors
sealed in / rolled round
history a coffin

the touch of

(William Wordsworth, Adonis)

.

Speak against bonds, my songs,
Deriving thy light from Heaven
--untended watchfire—
Go, my songs, to those who have delicate lust,
The Tricksome Hermes is here.

(William Wordsworth, Ezra Pound)

N.B. Of his "splicings" & related works, Robinson writes: "The splicings derive from having some years ago noted two poetic domains of literary interest and pleasure continually abutting in my mind. So, it started in response to a personal confusion as to where-I-was in the world. But at some point this juxtaposition took on a more representative cast, indicating an actual historical linkage between a romanticism and a modern-/postmodernism, in the spirit of Pierre Reverdy (as noted in Jerome Rothenberg’s Technicians of the Sacred, p. 456): 'The more distant and legitimate the relation between the two realities brought together, the stronger the image will be . . . the more emotive power and poetic reality it will possess.'” A scholar & a poet by turns, Robinson is the co-editor & co-author of Poems for the Millennium, volume 3 -- our big romanticism book.