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imaginative knowledge
From an endnote in Denise Levertov's Selected Poems:
"Imagination is what makes reality real to the mind (which is why it's so hard to imagine peace, for it has not been experienced in the reality of our life in history except as the absence of war). Yet not only peace but the disastrous realities of our time go unimagined, even when 'known about,' when 'psychic numbing' veils them; and this the energy to act constructively, which imaginative knowledge could generate, is repressed."
I feel a real kinship with Levertov's radical humanism; this book makes a nice companion piece to the Galeano I was reading earlier in the month. I'm also greatly interested in the spiritual poems that Levertov wrote later in life, after her conversion to Roman Catholicism. I don't consider myself a Catholic—I'd describe myself as a "militant agnostic"—but I'm drawn to the process of continual spiritual inquiry that governs Levertov's poems about faith. |
Monday, March 15, 2004
9:44 PM
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