The Writing Mentor
The Writing Mentor
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写作导师
DOI:
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发表时间:
2016
期刊:
影响因子:
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通讯作者:
Nan Cuba
中科院分区:
文献类型:
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作者:
Nan Cuba
The title, How Long is the Present, lets us know immediately that the poet is investigating the nature of time and art, as did French philosopher Bergson, when he posited a notion of “durée,” the qualitative time of art (1889). Proust took up Bergson’s idea and embodied it in his great project, A la recherche du temps perdu (1913-1927). Like Proust, David Antin explores the experience of inner time. How long is the present in art? David Antin helps the reader probe this question of what is fleeting and what stays. In the Romantic tradition, the poet-speaker is a medium for languages and time zones that are happening through him. The dynamic, rhythmical impulse to Antin’s poems is the primary characteristic of their being. Open the book anywhere and you will find the coherent rhythmical pattern that rocks us readers and reassures us that there is a firm, probing mind within these poems that will not fail us. The pauses, the stuttering, are marks of reflection and character; they give the work breathing space and spine. In one segment, our poet narrates an inquiry into that peculiar sense of time that one experiences on an airplane. Here Antin uses “you” as subject; the subject has “gone into some time that’s anterior to your time.” The poet leans into not-knowing what this particular time is, and “starts investigating in anything possible”: