Didactic Poetries

Description

Complex, haunting, imaginative and profoundly literary, Didactic Poetries is Beck’s response to Schiller’s statement: “We are still waiting for a didactic poem where thought itself would be and would remain poetic,” and Hegel’s claim that, “strictly speaking, didactic poetry isn’t poetry.” For the acclaimed French poet, Philippe Beck, Schiller’s task of attempting a didactic poetry remains as vital today as it was for Schiller’s time. Is there a way to construct a poetry built and chiseled, hammered and stitched, from out of past narratives and poetries, condensed in such a manner as to make new poetic verses sing new truths? Forging a singular attempt to echo the poets and tales of a bygone age, Beck’s didactic poetries perhaps carve out the path for renewing a poetic thought as a quasi-musical atmosphere where the reader can glimpse “A small country “sculpted” as spiritual, supposed to be so?at home in the Bygone Country. Alluvial layers so light, that weather disappeared, weary of variety a priori.” Beck’s deftly textured poems interweave contemporary commentary with cultural, historical, literary, and philosophical allusions, drawing the reader into a world of lived poetic experience. Cover Title Page Copyright Table of Contents Acknowledgments Accelerated Sublime Dedication Didactic Poetries 0. Liminal poem 1. Rilke 2. The Luth turtle 3. The urns 4. Writer 5. Sardinia honey 6. To read 7. Matter, I 8. Correction 9. Hannibal and Scipio 10. About a judgment 11. Water insect 12. The artist resents 13. Shale stairway 14. Smoke 15. Shine 16. Sentimental naïf 17. Attitude 18. Solitudinal 19. Twice Verlaine 20. Lame market 21. Slowness 22. Antipathy 23. Inventions 24. James and Stevenson 25. Drilling for petroleum 26. The delivery 27. Review 28. The household grump 29. Heroes 30. Wakefield’s fatigue 31. Josephine, ter 32. My Hawthorne 33. The unknown 34. Monsieur de 35. Blotting paper 36. The general rough draft 37. Steer’s sacrifice 38. Mallarmé inside 39. Forbidden to be old 40. Bibliologic 41. Antiphrases 42. Padded walls 43. Anticritical 44. And prose 45. Basalt blocks 46. In society 47. Wallenstein 48. The last man 49. Antirhythmic 50. Love 51. Of stone 52. Childish poetry 53. The after song 54. From realism 55. Old hoarseness 56. Empedocles, encore 57. Job revisited 58. Tomorrow Hamlet 59. Anger 60. Amusement 61. To do like Williams 62. Virgil’s modesty 63. Museum 64. Sunflower 65. Dialogue with Leuco 66. Beasts 67. A clarification 68. Matter, II 69. Ignorance of X 70. Islands