Similar themed archetypal dilemma poetry can be found in
"Entire Dilemma" By Michael Burkard
Review:
In his sixth collection of poetry, Entire Dilemma, Michael Burkard considers not only the life he has lived but also the many lives he has not lived, a range of might-have-beens, of alternative lives in parallel universes.
Even as he acknowledges the limits of ordinary and actual experience, Burkard delivers what human communities have always asked of their poets and poems: wonder and song. "[G]iven one's powerlessness," Burkard ponders whether "it isn't so far/fetched" to wish to "possess/a slightly other-than human//magic."
Burkard's poems work, at a subconscious level, to awaken us from the narcolepsy of everyday life to reach for the dream beyond. From a dreamer's vantage point, they envision life, death, love, recovery, earth, and the cosmos. As "contemplations of Being," these poems satisfy the poet's central responsibility, as phrased by Milosz.
Burkard's work is remarkable for its ability to ponder and think on the page without the usual crutches of logic. In "A Point," Burkard admits the necessity of having a point of reference but illustrates how fluid that point can be:
"All you need is a point.
It seems that it has no dimension.
but that point can become God.
Any God."
The self, for Burkard, is one such reference point. Like the moon that illuminates the book's central paradox of human connection and alienation, Burkard's "I" is a symbolic self whose particular experience will not be mined for pain nor mired in autobiography. Instead, Burkard's self functions as a kind of radar eye that locates human experience in its particular incidence.
That Burkard is able to occupy what has been described as "negative capability" is both challenge and consolation to any reader who feels and thinks and dreams and, in the final analysis, who arrives at the considered position with which the volume opens: "Fred,/I don't know what to do."
In plain language that resists both arcane and slang diction, Burkard is brilliantly original in terms of syntax, image, and flexibility of line. Entire Dilemma addresses everyday life: the people we know and those we don't; working for a living; death; alcoholism and sobriety; isolation and community. After the smoke and dust clear from the "canon wars," and when the dramatic, but essentially specious oppositions of poetry "schools" have run their course, Michael Burkard will be seen as a central and essential poet of our time.
EXAMPLE
A dark whimsy complicates Entire Dilemma. We must read Michael Burkard’s poems in the same way they were written—intuitively, sensing that they have been translated from a language we are not entirely fluent in, though we recognize the vocabulary:
Teachers are mean.
Their tenderness falls asleep
halfway through the class.
You took out a deck of cards
in order to survive.
You were punished.
Sent home.
Abolished.
For more on this title poem, see this link:
http://www.sarabandebooks.org/sarabande/Authors/Micheal%20Burkard/998329565562/readers_guide/review.html
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Good luck