I was chatting on the phone earlier with an old friend who vaguely lamented the way he "runs" his life in a business-like manner, and I replied that it's fine to view one's life from an industrial perspective, but perhaps it could be seen as more like a machine for the manufacture of pleasure? I was paraphrasing Cocteau's declaration that "poetry is a machine for the manufacture of love," which then reminded my friend that he'd wanted to tell me about the "very Lux Lotus" life and work of Bloomsbury group poet Paul Roche, whose obituary appeared over the weekend, especially the last paragraph:
“Poetry is awareness heightened to the point of love,” Mr. Roche wrote in 1970 in an essay for the reference work “Contemporary Poets.” “It is a way of apprehending the intensity of being. I try to recreate experience more intensely, reduce it to a luminous whole, render intuitive the meaning and metaphysics of the universe, and so feed myself and others the kernel of being.”
Isn't that a dream?
Two poems by Sappho, translated by Roche: Please, I More Than Envy Him.
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