This morning I was reminded of a poetic statement I wrote about doubt and poetic thinking over at The Poetry Society of America.
What was then relevant remains so for me today.
Statement
Brian Foley
Lately, I feel I'm writing toward my own version of a Protestant book; that I've been writing with a language that lives in protest to a performance of determinations, yet chained to the idea that that performance is necessary and determinations inevitable. This contradiction, which is a tradition, both breaks and is my heart.
I write intoxicated by doubt; the doubt that we've already been written by those things we run into the world with or that the world reeks upon us; that our language is born inadequate and only perseveres a release after a bright scrutiny's been made of it; that we should feel the ambience of shame without knowing the responsibility of what causes it.
Doubt is the grammar of progress. I consider it a common language, the language coded in the American Experiment that persists flagrantly plain and profitable even today. The subject of being wrong, of amending, of shifts, creates a path bought with the labor of doubt. This path is what the poem essentially is – movement - both toward and away from, the subject of the I, and the shame of it.
We live in an age that says change. How we are to get there and what it looks is a question whose answer is homeless. I believe it lives in a language we do not yet know. A poem is an event where we may engage the shame of not knowing. It is a place unlike any other.
What was then relevant remains so for me today.
Statement
Brian Foley
Lately, I feel I'm writing toward my own version of a Protestant book; that I've been writing with a language that lives in protest to a performance of determinations, yet chained to the idea that that performance is necessary and determinations inevitable. This contradiction, which is a tradition, both breaks and is my heart.
I write intoxicated by doubt; the doubt that we've already been written by those things we run into the world with or that the world reeks upon us; that our language is born inadequate and only perseveres a release after a bright scrutiny's been made of it; that we should feel the ambience of shame without knowing the responsibility of what causes it.
Doubt is the grammar of progress. I consider it a common language, the language coded in the American Experiment that persists flagrantly plain and profitable even today. The subject of being wrong, of amending, of shifts, creates a path bought with the labor of doubt. This path is what the poem essentially is – movement - both toward and away from, the subject of the I, and the shame of it.
We live in an age that says change. How we are to get there and what it looks is a question whose answer is homeless. I believe it lives in a language we do not yet know. A poem is an event where we may engage the shame of not knowing. It is a place unlike any other.