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LEAPING POETRY: An Idea with Poems and Translations by Robert--Ed. Bly

LEAPING POETRY: An Idea with Poems and Translations

By

Pub Date: Sept. 12th, 1975
ISBN: 0822960036
Publisher: Beacon

A fabulous, madly lucid, useful little book, comprising poems (by Rilke, Lorca, Ekelof, Takahashi, Ginsberg of course, and others who have the same understanding of how poems work; important to say it is not the common critical understanding) and essays on how to read them--that really work. Strong claim for a poetry text; hut Bly stands to orthodox criticism about the way Castaneda does to orthodox anthropology and so has resources that academics could only term occult. In this instance he calmly leads us out to the proposition that the real art of poetry consists in navigating beautiful shifts of consciousness between new, mammal brain and archaic reptile brain--but wait. Regardless of how you feel about the evolutionary brain model and its appropriateness here, it does point up something about the experience of these poems that more sanctioned approaches do not, and does so with compelling grace. Anyway, such is Bly's guileless authority that you can take him any way you want and still come away learning something about imagination. And his brain scheme, for the record, is heretically pro-neocortical. Elated and elating.