William Wordsworth leaves out of his Preface to Lyrical
Ballads any particular approach to physicality, to the body, or to bodily
awareness in general. By doing so, he leaves a certain critical door wide open
to accusations that both Lyrical Ballads and the rest of his oeuvre lack the
visceral quality born of rigorous physicality. When the mind, for example,
associates ideas in a state of excitement, Wordsworth seeks to document the
process in his poems; yet what the mind is reacting to is (Wordsworth suggests)
a kind of perceptive consciousness of the durable permanence of natural forms
and the human mind’s chiasmus with them. What if, however, we engage the durable permanence of
the human body itself, as Renaissance humanism likes to suggest? Or, even
better, engage texts and textuality which assume that the body itself is
an idea, and associations and entanglements of bodies are associations and
entanglements of ideas as well? This is in Keats’ Odal Cycle, and in Apparition
Poems as well, especially in 1070, which forms a palimpsest over Wordsworth’s
Solitary Reaper:
I said, “I can’t
even remember
the last time I
was excited, how
can I associate
ideas?”
She pulled
out a gun, a tube
of oil, and an air
cushion,
and it was
a spontaneous
overflow,
powerfully
felt, in which we
reaped together—
It is a backbone of
one of the strains of my work, which includes (also) Equations and When You
Bit…, that sexuality is not only an expression of our physical selves but also
an idea. A tangential thought is that, as is expressed in 1070, the human body
itself is an idea, and sex itself can be a kind of physical dialectic, a movement in three parts.
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