Terrence Des Pres was a reader and a writer, a very gifted reader and writer, who died young, but left behind a passionate body of work. The first paragraph of Praises & Dispraises serves as the Declaration of Faith on which this blog rests, survives, and grows:
"This book has been written for men and women who care about poetry and read it first of all for personal reasons. Such readers, I would like to think, know well enough the violent spirit of our century, and exactly for this reason expect at least one kind of language to hold its own against the grim disquiet. If they value it further as a means to poise and self-possession, they do not ask too much of a serious art. Poetry helps us seize our being-in-the-world, the better to enjoy, the better to endure. In this book, accordingly, poetry is prized and spoken of, in Kenneth Burke's fine phrase, as 'equipment for living.'"
And so here, too, everything we read must be written about as if it were "equipment for living." If we can't write this way, if we can't somehow see poetry as equipment, and if we can't use this equipment somehow to better our lives--which probably means better understand our lives--then we have to ask ourselves an even harder question: What in the world are we doing?
Recent Comments