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Overview
What if the great Romantic poet William Wordsworth were alive today? Jeffrey Robinson performs an act of textual magic that gives us a sense of what that might be like. Between August 2002 and August 2003 he kept a diary while reading Wordsworth and found that work of 200 years ago shows up powerfully as a fact of daily life. Experiments with spontaneous literary criticism tease out a lifetime of familiarity with the poet, his surroundings, and Romantic culture. "History" now opens to chance juxtapositions with events in the world and Robinson's own mind and quotidian experience, including his own Wordsworth-related poems in "open forms," along with running poetic commentaries. To renew familiar work by discovering direct ways into its "animating principles," Wordsworth is read through the ears and eyes of twentieth-century experimental poetry and poetics. This shows Wordsworth's own experimentalism and principle of "the life of things" to be still vital to poetic life now. Robinson's critical response belongs to the tradition of H.D., Charles Olson, Ronald Johnson,and Susan Howe.