The idea of genius, odd notes from Danny Langton’s class

3/7/2000 The word genius did not exist during Shakespeare’s time. It is a modern concept. The idea of genius, that people who are divinely blessed, was an anathema to 30 centuries of art. It is the death of art. It puts artists on a pedestal. We know nothing about Shakespeare, other than a meager handful of facts. In France they paint what they feel; in England they paint what they see; in Russia they paint what they hear. Or is it what they fear? Literature is an accretion of culture, literature collects barnacles. As in Nora Barnacle? We do not speak through language, it speaks through us. The subject is dissolved. The symptoms count, not the theory. The US is the only country to have slaves and expound freedom. At one time horses were necessary, but invisible. What am I doing invisibly that will be insensible 30 years from now? I write music the way a cow pisses said Mozart. When the railroad came, we had to shape time to fit a standard. No one can agree what metaphor is. The poorest way to read Finnigan’s Wake is in decipherment mode. Our imagination participates in poetry. Poetry is a special mode of discourse with a foreseen end. Poet as maker. As truth sayers. As liars. Poets can think literally, and are in touch with a primitive part of the brain. they have pictures in their heads long before they have the words for it. Poets shape moral reality into a moral world, said Picasso. And so we lie and lie and lie until you see the truth.


A poem should surprise and delight the senses. Listening to a craft lecture by Danny Langton was like falling down the rabbit hole into the creation of one of his poems. I was easily sidetracked. I guess these could be considered found poems of sorts.