Seidel

Who said confessionalism was dead? Just about everyone. Read Frederick Seidel and learn the limits of one's awareness. Here is a poetry larger than most everything written these days that comes straight from the planet Lowell-Berryman-Plath. "Straight" may be the wrong word for so knotted a consciousness, one so cosmically and personally tormented. "He hid his life away in poetry," says the poem "Frederick Seidel." Boring? It's like being bored at a beheading, bored at the final judgement of what we have amounted to. If they find anything in the dust millennia from now (whoever or whatever "they" are), the only chance the best of us has to be is what we had the courage and perception to see and say about ourselves. The "confessors" wont be alone out there, but they'll up there at the front of the parade. As Seidel shows us in THE COSMOS TRILOGY, we're caught between a cosmos that can't see us or care for us and an ego we can't turn off except by self-laceration.

proust's sentence

Not all of Proust's sentences are alike, but there is one he's fond off which, by its behavior, suggests that P. grew weary of the limits of the sentence. He wants so badly at certain monents to include everything, thought, feeling, plus some sense of the physical world where the thought and feeling are taking place, that the sentence begins to distend, hemmoraging with parentheses, backpedaling into the past with dependant clause inside dependent clause, to the point almost of bursting. It seems as though he's showing us that the sentence can't really contain what there is of life, and yet he will not quite break it, believing, I would assume, that no other communicative protocol can approach the sentence's omnivorous jaws.