Medea the Sorceress

by Diane Wakoski

Book Overview

A sustained meditation on personal past and the secret nature of reality. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0876858094
• ISBN13: 9780876858097
• Release Date: September 1990
• Publisher: Black Sparrow Press
• Length: 198 Pages
• Weight: 0.72 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.9" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

An Archeology of Movies and Books

For her 1988 collection, "Emerald Ice: Selected Poems 1962 - 1987," Diane Wakoski was awarded the Poetry Society of America William Carlos Williams Award. That award is a fitting tribute, for Wakoski draws on Williams' book-length poem "Paterson" as a model for this 1990 volume, "Medea the Sorceress." "Medea the Sorceress" - volume one of a longer work entitled The Archeology of Movies and Books - is a more ambitious project than Wakoski's initial attempt at a book length work, the ongoing Greed poems. Wakoski draws upon Williams example of incorporating short lyric poems, letters to various friends, prose fragments from other authors and meditations on various subjects (notably the new physics and Hollywood movies) into a layered verse structure. And like "Paterson," Wakoski enables a specific geography to speak to larger concerns. However, Wakoski's specific geography (outlined by a map in the beginning of the book) is not an actual location but a poetic locale that expands across two continents and the poet's own lifetime. As in the short imagistic and lyric poems for which she is well known, Wakoski utitlizes the material of her own life in the creation of a personal mythology. The result, in "Medea the Sorceress," is an original work that expands upon earlier attempts at the long form. The proposed title for this multi-volume work - The Archeology of Movies and Books (which is also the title of a remarkable poem in the present volume) - suggests the unearthing of personal meaning found in film and literature. The title hints at what the art critic Donald Kuspit calls "archaeologism," or post-modernism as excavation. Kuspit - linking such a practice to Freud's use of the archeological metaphor to explain the psychoanalytic method and Michael Foucault's archeological analysis - sees archaeologism as a method of establishing meaning from the discursive, fragmented depths of the unconscious. "Medea the Sorceress" may be read in this dusty light. Come prepared with trowels that dig at metaphor.