Feb 22, 2008

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"Like Palmer’s analytic lyric, Hollander’s “critical music” employs a conceit of lyric implication as a function of engaging/ involving the reader with the text. Palmer’s approach might be characterized as deductive, e.g. by writing in response to the Vietnam War (The Circular Gates), as a way of addressing the interrogative capacity of the lyric. While Hollander’s approach might be characterized as inductive in concordance with Jabes’ “that’s what my struggle with writing’s about; moving from the greatest precision in order to get to the largest opening. And what I tell you of words, I could also say of each book which contains in itself other books, which opens out to other books.” (Jabes, ACTS 5, P. 11) Like Jabes, Hollander strives to explode the normative reader/writer bi-polarity into a reader/ writer—writer/ reader equality. So that “We do, because when its thinking minds us, when we are, in a word, sentenced to mind it, when our addictions to love and self and selfless love lie versed like his kind in words which order our attention to the world and him, it is not him.” (Hollander, ACTS 7, P.98) It is him and it is not him. It is Davies being written about yet is also Hollander, and all of us, being written about. It is all of us being reviewed. “We do because there is a level of trust we keep.”"

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