Essay on Pope
Richard Blevins
artwork by t thilleman
ISBN 978-1-963908-75-6 100 pages $28.00
Argument
Edward Dorn and an American scholar have agreed to meet in London
on the 300th anniversary of Alexander Pope’s birth. Due to the formal nature
and current conditions of Poetry and Scholarship, the two miss connections—
Dorn participating in ceremonies at Pope’s Tomb; and our narrator the Gloomy Clerk
arriving at the Grotto. Antonin Artaud engineers a conceptual Bridge between the
oppositions of life or death.
A “Dorn” is a thorn like Pope, in the side.
Bernofsky’s “A thorn gets stuck in an eye.”
Society can carry the form’r
Around for a long while like a thin book;
Eyes require immediate attention.
Richard Lowell Blevins is a poet writing in the tradition of Ezra Pound, H.D., and Robert Duncan, an editor of the Charles Olson-Robert Creeley correspondence, and an award-winning teacher. He was born in Wadsworth, Ohio, in 1950. His undergraduate career was halved by the May 4, 1970, Kent State shootings. He was declared a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War. At Kent State, he studied poetry and the imagination with Duncan and literature of the American West with Edward Dorn. But he has often said that Cleveland book dealer James Lowell was his most formative early influence. He holds degrees from Kent State University (General Studies, 1973), the University of Oregon (MA, English literature, 1976), and the University of Pittsburgh (Ph.D., English literature, 1985; dissertation on the western novels of Will Henry. He has taught literature and poetry writing at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg since 1978, also serving as Humanities Chair for nine years. He is a winner of a Chancellor’s Award, in 1999, the university’s highest recognition for teaching. He previously taught at the University of Akron and Kent State.
