favorite – Little Bristling Soul

Francis Bacon. Figure with Two Owls, Study for Velazquez (1963) – San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Public park by Latz + Partner, 2002

In Gardens: Profiles of Contemporary European Landscape ArchitectureBy Udo Weilacher

“The Lost and Unlost Poetry and the irrevocable past”; CAROLYN FORCHE INTERVIEWED BY THE EDITORS of Poetry Magazine

Can the poetry of witness be a purely spiritual phenomenon? That is, can the dynamic that you’re describing in this essay, the permanent wounding of consciousness and language, occur from metaphysical, as well as physical, trauma?

If we think of the spiritual as a way of knowing, one can be wounded spiritually. Jean-François Lyotard would argue that the language of the Torah is permanently wounded by the experience of the divine. Jacob endures wrestling with the stranger, his angel. The slightest shock or event can send you from one thinking to another; trauma is said to occur when this shock is sufficiently strong as to overwhelm. If the experience of God is traumatic, it is because we meet with the incommensurate.