Poetic Authority

In an essay about my book Memory a critic discusses my relation to the idea of Poetic Authority.These essays about my work can be reached from the list of publications here at this blog. - my access to this theory of Poetic Authority returned me at the time to the childhood readings of Pogo - Rowrbazzle! whatever such a word means.

Poetic Authority springs from Milton - Milton needed Poetic Authority from the church of his time to publish - and I learned that his work was read as having Divine Inspiration. My own expectation is that my own poems are not Divinely Inspired in this way. I enter my comment here not as a Disclaimer - I have no idea what a Disclaimer on such a thing could mean. The critic wonders if I have Poetic Authority - I would believe I had no more Poetic Authority (Divine Inspiration) than any other person who has published or had a degree from the University of Iowa Writers Workshop. I think it is Poetic Licence.

It is nearly Easter, I return at times to thoughts of childhood readings in Pogo - At this point from reading and being on the internet about the psalms - Who Killed Cock Robin - "I, said the thrush as she sat in the bush, I will sing him a psalm."(Then Beauregard, the hound, who is reading the poem aloud, asks, "What's a pea-salm?"), Poets on the Psalms, which includes an essay by Madelyn Defrees among others.

When First Lutheran Church headed into celebrating its 125th anniversary I was able to contribute to the choir with song translations of two hymns from Swedish that had been part of their standard along with a translation of a hymn which was a translation of Psalm 19 by Ludwig Runeberg, the Swedish-Finnish poet, a hymn with a long presence at First Lutheran Church in Tacoma, Washington.