Zagajewski, Adam - Donald Revell (essay date 1992)
Donald Revell (essay date 1992)
SOURCE: "The Plural of Vision Remains Vision," in Ohio Review, Vol. 48, 1992, pp. 101-2, 108-11.
[In the following review, Revell praises Zagajewski for his "poetry of witness, " particularly for his ability to truthfully convey his vision.]
Poetry survives ideology because poetry is the body, the act, and the desire of an entirely stateless radicalism. By "stateless" I mean a condition of constant dispossession on behalf of the freedom of the real. Eurydice travels ahead of Orpheus. And by "radicalism" I mean a dedication to root experience which, of necessity, requires the preliminary experience of uprootedness. The waking of a poem uproots a dream from sleep. In the aftermath of ideologies and the unmasking of cynical reactionaries long disguised as reformers, only one radicalism, the Ur-radicalism, remains credible: vision, the gift to imagine without ownership or control. For poets, vision entails an...
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