Returning to Lorca

I love matching up my intelligence with Lorca's very different kind of intelligence. It is a great feeling of give-and-take. I feel like Robert Duncan writing about H.D. I am not saying that I am a brilliant poet-critic like Duncan, of course, but that I feel Lorca elicits a kind of intelligence in myself that I would not have otherwise, challenging me to explore that region between more conventional academic analysis and something harder to express, related to Duncan's "inner nature and process of poetry." I feel that I can bridge this gap just about as well as anyone, precisely because I am suspicious of both rationalist, academic reduction and the anti-intellectual reductions on the other side.

When I took courses at Stanford with a Jungian critic, Al Gelpi, I resisted him every step of the way. I just could not take Jungianism. I still cannot. I am allergic to certain kinds of bullshit and softheadedness. I don't even like mythopoesis. I'd like to say that this is an advantage, even when dealing with poetics that resists the intelligence almost successfully, as Wallace Stevens would say. It is in that almost where I put most of my energy, that space where poetry gives way to an intelligent approach.