Hyperallergic Considers Geoffrey O’Brien’s Where Did Poetry Come From

At Hyperallergic, Norman Finkelstein reviews Geoffrey O'Brien's new memoir Where Did Poetry Come From: Some Early Encounters (Marsh Hawk Press), part of the publisher's series of memoirs by poets. Finkelstein describes the book as "an exploration of […] language magic, part sound, part sense, part bodily sensation, part thought process." From there: 

O’Brien repeatedly notes that the poems that have had such a profound impact on him were originally experienced as spells. Recalling the aunt who introduces “Jabberwocky” to him, he tells us that her “voice by itself brought light into the house — reciting, from memory, with the air of someone sharing a great secret.” “Here mysteries begin” he declares of Oberon’s speech to Puck about the love charm in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Wilde’s decadent Salome is “Like the Bible made strange.” And Poe is “the necessary book, necessary because the words are stored and may be suddenly required. Consulted, like a book of spells.”

Casting a spell, however, entails some degree of psychic risk. One of O’Brien’s most compelling chapters engages Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” surely one of the most magical poems in the language (and the poem that transformed this reviewer into a poet nearly a lifetime ago). For O’Brien, the poem, as he tells us, like the flower which Rod Taylor brings back from the future in the film of The Time Machine, is “The object that by its existence smashes the separation between incommensurable worlds.” 

Read more at Hyperallergic.