Mystical and Maternal

Stephen Burt reviews Karen Weiser's new book in The Believer:

William Blake took dictation from “devils” and Jack Spicer compared the source of poetry to an otherworldly radio. Karen Weiser, too, seeks a “knowledge beyond conscious experience,” a poetic language so singular that it sounds nothing like the language of expository prose. Her foreword makes clear her dependence on Spicer, but her poetry never sounds like his. It’s more euphonious and a lot more fun, and it’s in part (she says) a response to motherhood and pregnancy. Instead of Spicer’s mystical “practice of outside,” Weiser has had another human being gestating “inside”: “You yourself are the egg-cup,” she writes, “putting both constitutions together one / smoke signal at a time.”