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Unread 04-19-2012, 06:46 AM
epigone epigone is offline
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Location: Valparaiso, Indiana
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Since the review is back up at the top of the page, I think I'll take the opportunity to say something about the process of reviewing this book. I've been reading Wendy's poetry for some time and I almost always like what I read, but I have always had a hard time explaining what I like about her poetry. So the challenge of the review was to try to discover a way to describe Wendy's poetry in a way that covered the effects she manages to produce without just quoting her over and over again.

But as I read through the entire book, and then re-read it and re-read it, I discovered that her poems return to a number of themes and explore those themes from different angles and in different contexts. Wendy is a philosophical poet in ways I had not previously appreciated. So most of all, writing the review taught me a couple of valuable lessons (which may be obvious but they were revelations to me) that I hope I don't lose track of.

First, sometimes one needs a book to really appreciate a poet's project. Reading a poet's work one poem at a time over a period of years may not enable one to appreciate the poetry as a whole. In short, not only does there need to be poetry and poetry anthologies, we need books.

Second, my response to Wendy's poetry puts me in mind of some of the arguments that Malcolm Gladwell makes in Blink. Many times, I read a Wendy poem and immediately like it, but at first -- and sometimes for a long time afterwards -- I cannot articulate what it is that I like, especially since Wendy can do things with poems that would annoy me in other people's poems. She can be loose without being sloppy.

One might think that an aesthetic judgment that one cannot defend is an unreliable one, but it seems we (or I might say "I," since I have no idea if the phenomenon is widespread) possess aesthetic and even intellectual intuitions that exceed our ability to identify, recognize or analyze what triggers the feelings of pleasure that arise from an encounter with a successful poem. In the case of Wendy's poems, I always recognized a certain surface quality that beguiled and sometimes dazzled, but only upon reading the book did I come to realize that the poems both expressed and embodied a coherent, challenging and stimulating world view. I think I somehow sensed that, among other lovely things going on in Wendy's poems, there was a mind doing excellent work in these poems, but I had no idea of the nature of that work until I tried to review Nevertheless.

epigone
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