At any rate, I'll be talking about Peter O'Leary's dazzling poem The Sampo. The talk's called "The 'twilight machine': Nonhuman Poetics in Peter O'Leary's The Sampo." Come hear me Thursday afternoon. Here's the first couple of paragraphs:
Peter O’Leary—a devout but profoundly syncretic
(perhaps even heterodox) Roman Catholic poet—has long been devoted to investigating
the nonhuman. His first three collections, written very much under the
influence of his mentor the visionary late modernist poet Ronald Johnson, are
explorations of a deity conceived in emphatically non-anthropomorphic terms, if
mediated through centuries of religious tradition. In his fourth book, Phosphorescence of Thought (2013),
O’Leary brings his poetics to focus as much on the natural world as as the
supernatural: this long poem, modeled to some degree on Whitman’s Song of Myself, envisions the processual
whole of nature, from the minute details of the poet’s hikes along the Des
Plaines river (birds, the movement of water), to the chemical processes of life
itself, to the neural transactions by which human beings strive to make sense
of their environment, all as a manifestation of deity.
This
ecopoetical shift in O’Leary’s work has ramified in interesting directions in
his latest publication, the
2016 narrative poem The Sampo, which
adapts passages from the Finnish national epic the Kalevala. This poem marks a number of shifts in O’Leary’s writing. Perhaps
most notably, while his earlier poetry takes the lyrical, ruminative, and
paratactic forms characteristic of such (broadly speaking) modernist poets as
Johnson, Louis Zukofsky, Basil Bunting, and Wallace Stevens, The Sampo is a narrative poem: and a fantasy narrative, no less, a story that
might even be categorized among the much-reviled “sword and sorcery” subgenre
of fantasy.
And it gets better from there...
