william watkin's blog (since 2003)

Within the discipline of Romantic studies, Wordsworth’s ‘The Solitary Reaper’ holds an exemplary place. The story recounted by the poem is an archetypal narrative of what has been called the Romantic Ideology. As is typical of ideology, its nefarious influence is assumed to propagate throughout the whole of English language poetry, giving rise in contemporary poetics to mainstream, free-verse late-Romantic poetry such as we find in Seamus Heaney, and the rejection of this model to be found in the poetics of Charles Bernstein. The poem begins with the event of an encounter, ‘Behold her, single in the field / Yon solitary highland lass! / Reaping and singing by herself / Stop here, or gently pass!’ Opting for the first of the two injunctions, the journeying poet listens to her as she sings ‘a melancholy strain’. The reaper sings in a language that Wordsworth does not know which leads him to speculate as to what she may be singing across the middle two of the poem’s four stanzas. ...

Frank O’Hara, Collected Poems (Berkeley, Cal.: University of California Press, 1995) Pages 301-491 Close Readings and annotations of every poem in the collection September 1997 in preparation for In the Process of Poetry: The New York School and the Avant-Garde (Bucknell UP, 2001) Frank O’Hara “Ode on Causality”, 302-3 · originally an ode of Jackson Pollock, the relation of Pollock’s aesthetic practice to causality rather than to symbolism is key here, naturally the all-over drip technique Pollock pioneered was essentially a casual form if causal is to be conceived of as a concatenated ongoing process, the postmodern teleology without telos, but also if it is to be thought of in metonymical terms as a practice based on contiguity and causal links which is essentially the aesthetics of Personism in general, of closeness and attention. The poem was originally entitled “”Elegy on Causality (in the Five Spot Cafe)” which links it up with “The Day Lady...”, and also suggests that the...

Frank O’Hara, Collected Poems (Berkeley, Cal.: University of California Press, 1995) Pages 201-300 Close Readings and annotations of every poem in the collection September 1997 in preparation for In the Process of Poetry: The New York School and the Avant-Garde (Bucknell UP, 2001) Frank O’Hara “In the Movies”, 206-209 · interesting that this poem has not been picked up by the critics for it is an easy point to indicate the importance of films in O'Hara’s aesthetic indicating the dissolves, cuts and montage effects he has been credited with and whilst I do not like to appropriate analogous terms in this fashion the montage of O'Hara is easily distinguishable form the collage of Ashbery in that here it is the movement from image to image in an attempt at seamlessness, a basic synaesthesia of subject in the now of consciousness. · in addition to the basic aesthetic implications of this use of films there are also certain other issues that he raises here but does not rea...