The Geography of the Imagination: Forty Essays (Nonpareil Book, 78): 10 (Nonpareil Books, 10)

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And even if much of the territory is terra incognito for me, his demanding and un-condescending essays are perfect launching pads for further explorations. Ranging from reflections on the Enlightenment and revolution to a consideration of the Frankfurt School, this collection offers insight into the topics preoccupying Foucault as he worked on what would be his last body of published work, the three-volume History of Sexuality. M. Doughty's six-volume epic poem, The Dawn in Britain, and for the works of Ronald Johnson, Jonathan Williams and Paul Metcalf. The title struck me as a paradox though: geography deals with boundaries whereas imagination is famously boundless.

Unless he designates that a poem is a paraphrase of Latin, we miss it, Latin having dropped from classrooms.Such brute power can only be met with an equal and opposite moral strength, like that of the Jehovah's Witnesses who prayed for the souls of the machinegunners before whom they fell at Buchenwald, the singing Christians Nero nailed to crosses in the Circus, or Mandelstam's colleague the poet Gumilyov who crumbled under the volleys of a Soviet firing squad, clutching a Bible and a Homer to his heart. A page of Mandelstam's prose is a kind of algebra of ironies over which the same hand has drawn comic furniture and objects with a life of their own a la Chagall.

If reality can be pictured in words, words must be seen as a set of essences in parallel series to the world. The Geography of the Imagination is a book I often bring with me when I travel because no matter my mood, there’s usually an essay to suit it and because so many of the essays bear reading a third or even a fourth time. Yet we constantly see and hear stories of betrayal, and many people have personally experienced a destructive breach of loyalty. Forty essays on history, art, and literature from one of the most incisive, and most exhilarating, critical minds of the twentieth century.Far from wanting a word to be invisible, unassertive, the makeshift vehicle for something else ("idea," "thought"), I want every word to be wholly, thoroughly a word. That's the thrust - modern literature and poetry and art and even music and architecture peeled back layer by layer to uncover their links to antiquity - and how those allusions to the past skip over the present's community conscious like a flat rock across a shallow creek. So it was strange to read Davenport calmly, humbly, almost professorially explicating the ideogrammatic densities and “architectonic” collages of Pound and Olson, Marianne Moore and Paul Metcalf, without dropping even a hint that he is a part of their lineage, playing in the same league. I was twenty years old and had just moved to NYC, where I found a job within a couple weeks at Endicott Booksellers. Still, I value quite highly the introduction to the concepts behind this type of poetry, and to the other subjects also, as an extension to an incomplete education.