Just finished Nathaniel Mackey's _Four for Glenn_. The four extended poems are lyrics—lyrics in more than the hackneyed personal lyric trend that floods too many MFA programs. Mackey throws out musical phrase after musical phrase as he mentions far distant places, from Cuszo to Khartoum. With its musical quality, it feels as if we, as readers, are being carried with the music to far distant places. That sounds cliché, but in some sense we can float with the lyricism of the lines without needing to figure out their "significance." In that sense, the poems hold up.
Reading Tasso's _Jerusalem Liberated_ now. It's a traditional epic, albeit a Renaissance epic, with some crazy elements thrown in to accommodate a Christian worldview. For example, God talks to himself in the work, but he only seems to talk when what he has to say is obvious. When his chosen soldiers are dying from the heat on the battlefield, we don't hear anything from God until the leader of the soldiers prays; all of the sudden, God decides it's time to help his chosen ones—the way it is worded makes it seem like he just figures that out. Another crazy detail is that in this highly Christian epic, Tasso includes a sorcerer from the pagans who can bewitch objects. How that fits with the Christian story is beyond me. A more humorous example of Tasso's use of Christian thought is the soldiers who leave the siege of Jerusalem right in the middle to follow their desire for women. According to the allegory, the soldiers let desire overcome their faithfulness to God, i.e. they abandon their holy task of capturing Jerusalem. Having the soldiers just leave on a practical level seems just humorous.
Reading Tasso's _Jerusalem Liberated_ now. It's a traditional epic, albeit a Renaissance epic, with some crazy elements thrown in to accommodate a Christian worldview. For example, God talks to himself in the work, but he only seems to talk when what he has to say is obvious. When his chosen soldiers are dying from the heat on the battlefield, we don't hear anything from God until the leader of the soldiers prays; all of the sudden, God decides it's time to help his chosen ones—the way it is worded makes it seem like he just figures that out. Another crazy detail is that in this highly Christian epic, Tasso includes a sorcerer from the pagans who can bewitch objects. How that fits with the Christian story is beyond me. A more humorous example of Tasso's use of Christian thought is the soldiers who leave the siege of Jerusalem right in the middle to follow their desire for women. According to the allegory, the soldiers let desire overcome their faithfulness to God, i.e. they abandon their holy task of capturing Jerusalem. Having the soldiers just leave on a practical level seems just humorous.
Comments