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Inasmuch as Whalen's poetry can be accurately called a "graph of a mind moving"—that is, accurately described as an interrogation of self and subjectivity—it is likewise the graph of a mind bent on composing poetry, formulating aesthetic responses, and his trope makes it evident that poetry has become a mode of investigation for Whalen. Those responses are generated by compositional decisions, and in compositional terms, the poem is not so much poetic statement as an event the writer participates in—or as Robert Creeley puts it, a process felt and acted upon as crucial in itself (374). That is to say, writing such poetry has the potential to produce the experience of value, for writing is a way to participate in higher order experiences thru the poem, and for Whalen, it can produce experiences capable of transformation. What such a poem does, at least in part, is not so much propose a world as allow readers to inhabit a particular imaginative event, valuable as poetry.  In Whalen's case, the verse is characterized by humor and playfulness. That sense of play consists of much mimicry, role playing, pretend, hyperbole, nonsense, sound association, shifts in perspective, imaginary encounters, and just plain doodling.  That sense of play has a specific impact on how the text unfolds, but more importantly in how the lyric subject is configured.  In Whalen's case, then, there's an explicit study of the mind, with the intent not only of producing poems, but also of innovating on that subject position and transforming self.