I take the Waste Land as a day-to-day thing. When a dismal, cold slate gray rain falls from a slate gray sky, when it looks like wartime London, need we say more \u2014 T.S. Eliot\u2019s 1922 poem, celebrating its centennial, rules. A wasteland is a wasteland is a wasteland. The prophetic voice of the poem sets the stage, as it is dramatic, for the habitation of our current dark times.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Then the tail of the hurricane clears the way for a gleam of sun to make shoot through treetops of an elm treetops \u2014 oh fickle reader, I put catastrophe further back on the horizon, leave the charred landscape for another day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As things change, there is one thing I know \u2014 the poem of the Wasteland, a gorgeous collage of urban, literary and mythical remixings \u2014 has many voices, many ways to see the flux. Etymologically, the word Catastrophe, in ancient Greek, fuses \u201cdown, against\u201d and \u201cI turn\u201d to signify \u201cI overturn.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The current conversation about environment, the Anthropocene & impending disaster is different ways to turn our vision.\u00a0 For me, it is the project of expanding and broadening the ways of beauty.\u00a0 Poetry with its poking and prodding stick probably says it better, making forays into territories that were once forbidding but where with imagination and stillness we now can go.\u00a0 Into wastelands as rich wild places, places of possible regeneration.\u00a0 Or fascination, empty spaces that make poets from divergent times contemporaneous.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I take the Waste Land as a day-to-day thing. When a dismal, cold slate gray rain falls from a slate gray sky, when it looks like wartime London, need we say more \u2014 T.S. Eliot\u2019s 1922 poem, celebrating its centennial, … Continue reading