The Divine Anxiety

The Divine Anxiety:

1.
The high tension of reading a poem is such that any reader is somehow, somewhere, secretly or otherwise anxious for The End, for the poem to end. That anxiety for conclusion is built into the nature of the lyric poem, the short poem, and we can't escape it. Poetry seems like a clash of Gertrude Stein's "writing wants to go on" with a kind of Aristotelian "the form wants closure" -- it may be the very tension that makes us love the delicate discomfort of the poem.

2.
The Divine Anxiety:

The high tension of reading a poem
is such that any reader is somehow,
somewhere, secretly or otherwise anxious
for The End, for the poem to end.
That anxiety for conclusion is built
into the nature of the lyric poem,
the short poem, and we can't escape it.
Poetry seems like a clash of Gertrude Stein's
"writing wants to go on"
with a kind of Aristotelian
"the form wants closure" --
it may be the very tension that makes us love
the delicate discomfort of the poem.


Robert Kelly

Posted over on Ready Steady Book

1. Kelly's prose poem.
2. Line breaks by Glenn Buttkus