central image—the objective correlative, you boomed, quoting T.S. Eliot.
That, to my then fresh-impressionable mind—and perhaps to countless other generations before me—was revolutionary, seductive, and I could feel a tsunami of utter embarrassment over all the puerile versifying I had been scribbling for the past few years. This was serious stuff, the real thing, the big league— and it was as exciting as it was frightening. We have stared into the abyss. There was no going back to Slayer and Metallica lyrics at this stage. But even more frightening was the idea of poetry as craft, the notion of something sublime as “writing” being treated no dif- ferently from carpentry or bricklaying. You mean, we groaned, this thing doesn’t just come from the sky like lightning, or “a dark undiscipline of clouds” or something? You mean, we actually have to work? “Do not begrudge the labor of the file,” you counseled us, mouthing some dead Roman. The bad news was, yes. That genuine outrage ironically demanded infinitely higher elements of control, that age-old notion of knowledge of the rules before they are broken. Things made sense, finally. I mean all the things I had been preoccupied with. The music, even the energy of rock and jazz, found equal frequencies in poetry. Mindblowing how you’ve managed to sum up the formula of writing poetry into a handful of bullet points, into a convenient set of formulas. You made it sound so treacher- ously easy: central image, which can either be centrifugal (a dominant situation around which all related details revolve) or centripetal (a seemingly disparate miasma of images all orbit- ing toward that one significant idea). “Objectify the subject.
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