Читать книгу Thomas Merton's Poetics of Self-Dissolution онлайн
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The subversive component of his poetry is still pervasive in his last two books. Influenced by the theories of Herbert Marcuse and his attack on the functional discourse of a unidimensional society, in Cables to the Ace (1968), he focuses on the trivialization of language and the death of the symbol in our modern times. As George Woodcock has pointed out, this long poem is “the antipoetic diagnosis of the world’s ills, accompanied by a poetic prescription for its cure.”38 Written in a style which lacks all kind of literary ornaments, it could be described as a radical experiment with the language of alienation and its subsequent transfiguration in a new poetry, an antipoetry, characterized by the absence of metrics and rhyme, the abandonment of conventional syntax, and the break of the linear and chronological sequence of the text in the manner of modernist authors such as T.S. Eliot or Ezra Pound.
The Geography of Lograire (1968) also questions the alienated and alienating discourse of the Western myth, whose oppressive power has always been imposed on other cultures, considered as inferior, such as the Sioux, Mayans or Melanesians.39 Like Cables this epic poem appears as a denunciation of the mental and linguistic habits of our philosophical, religious, political and cultural heritage, and it calls for a new sensitivity which can act as a guidance for a reinterpretation of the word “man” and the word “Life.”