William Irwin Thompson

Broschiertes Buch

Nightwatch and Dayshift

Poems 2007-2014

Beschreibung

"I first caught fire in high school and burned with an embarrassing adolescent passion for poetry through the works of Lao Tze and Dylan Thomas; and then, as a sophomore, in college for Gerard Manly Hopkins, T. S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, Wallace Stevens, and the octosyllabic ballad meditations on place of Frederico Garcia Lorca and Kenneth Rexroth. In the fifties, Rexroth's The Phoenix and the Tortoise meant far more to me than Ginsberg and the Beats. Now, after having written poetry for sixty years, I can see that I am still held in thrall by the Romantic genre of poems of description and meditation. But instead of trying to be a Wordsworth inscribing his poem into the living rock in the Lakes Country, I have tried to win the right to exist by writing myself into the place I happen to be. In this book I have tried to inhabit Portland, Maine through street poems, as before in A Diary of Sorts and Streets (2006) I did with Zurich, New York, Toronto, and Cambridge. But as a wanderer, I am not a native to any place, so the other Goethean twin soul in me has felt a pull into a solitary and mystical companionship with the stars. A Portland Calendar marks my temporary location, but Nightwatch pulls me up and out of my shallow rootedness. I stop-whether I am in the mountains in Crestone, Colorado or looking out of my apartment window in Portland-to see the Pleiades, and realize that at the intersection of time and eternity the light has changed." - William Irwin Thompson

Autor

William Irwin Thompson (1938-2020) was born in Chicago, but moved to Southern California in 1945, where he graduated from Los Angeles High School in 1957 and Pomona College in 1962. He received a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship to study at Cornell in 1962 and a Woodrow Wilson Dissertation Fellowship to do his doctoral research in Dublin in 1964. He received his doctorate from Cornell in 1966 and published his first book, "The Imagination of an Insurrection: Dublin, Easter 1916" in 1967. In 1972, his second book "At the Edge of History" was a finalist for the National Book Award. In 1986 he won the Oslo International Poetry Festival Award for his novel, "Islands Out of Time."Thompson taught at Cornell, MIT, and York University in Toronto. He forged an interdisciplinary career; and studied anthropology, philosophy, and literature at Pomona, and literature and cultural history at Cornell. He has served as visiting professor of religion at Syracuse University (1973), visiting professor of Celtic Studies at St. Michael's College, the University of Toronto (1984), visiting professor of political science at the University of Hawaii at Manoa (1985), Rockefeller Scholar at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco (1992-1995), and Lindisfarne Scholar-in-Residence at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York in the autumn of each year from 1992 to 1996. In 1995 he designed an evolution of consciousness curriculum for the Ross School in East Hampton, New York and served as a Founding Mentor. Thompson founded the Lindisfarne Association in 1972 and served as its Director until 1997. William Irwin Thompson continued to devote himself to writing essays and poetry and was a contributor to the "Wild River Review" in retirement.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Tree of Life Books
• Seitenzahl: 232
• Erscheinungstermin: 25. Juni 2024
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 216mm x 140mm x 14mm
• Gewicht: 333g
• ISBN-13: 9798989638291
• Artikelnr.: 71183912