Quotes & Sources The Fairfield Review,An On-line Literary Magazine for the Global Community.
CONVERSATION: POETRY AN ECSTASY
Coleman Barks & Robert Bly, Sunday, September 22, 9:30 AM
Barks: "Rumi said that form is a state of ecstasy. [that includes all poetry!]"
Barks: poetic ecstasy is “full of passionate attention, relishing of every moment in the choice of words, diction.”
Barks: “Ecstasy is close to gibberish.” He cited some of G. Hopkins poems as examples.
Bly: Kohat (sp?), a more recent German psychologist, talks about “grandiosity” as a natural form. We have “grandiosity at birth,” and then it is “disciplined away.” Hopkins is someone who has broken out of this.
Bly: “When you meet someone who makes you feel small, get another friend.”
Bly: "You felt ecstasy in simple things like snow before you went to school."
Bly: Robert Moore: "grandiosity is a God implant."
Bly: "There is a dark side of grandiosity, especially in politics, ... for example, in Hitler."
Bly: "There is an ecstatic moment when seeing the beloved."
Barks: Rumi said “I see my beauty in you.”
Bly: Hafez (sp?), a “brother” to Rumi, said in a poem “no creature has been comfortable beneath this turquoise dome…. [I am] left with only wind in my hands.”
Barks: "...grandiosity is tempered by humility, discipline."
Bly: Old Lutheran habit, "to expunge grandiosity and replace it with guilt…" to get “peace in the house.”
Bly: “Most religions use suppression of grandiosity to see the face of God.”
Bly: "If you are grandiose, you are not a good father—children ground you."
Bly: "Ecstasy and the apocalyptic are both ecstatic views."... "The apocalyptic is the view of destruction."
Home
Contents
Prev
Next