All These Roads: The Poetry of Louis Dudek

Line and Form

Line and Form The great orchestrating principle of gravity makes such music of mountains as shaped by the mathematical hands of four winds, clouds yield in excellent and experimental sculpture; mushrooms, elephants and women’s legs, have too their form generated within a three-dimensional space efficiently. And so the emotions combine into exquisite counterparts of the mind and body when the moving principle and the natural limits imposed work against each other, give in, and resist. The form is then the single body of love that two wrestlers make. But has each one his own? or is one? What essential form has a wind or the sky that cutting into each other they mimic living arms? Eternal forms. The single power, working alone rounds out a parabola that flies into the infinite; but the deflected particle out of that line, will fetch a frisk of sixes and eights before it vanishes: 18 / All These Roads an ocean arrested by sudden solid ripples out in the sand. So this world of forms, having no scope for eternity, is created in the limitation of what would be complete and perfect, achieving virtue only by the justness of its compromises. The Poetry of Louis Dudek / 19 ...