Now I am reading this immensely interesting (for the most part) book by Lewis Hyde called The Gift, which a friend told me to read about twenty years ago though I am just now getting around to it. The main thesis concerns poetry's being a gift that circulates the way that potlatch gifts once circulated: the poet is given inspiration, writes a poem, then gives the poem to someone else (readers, but that is supposing there are any,) all without renumeration. The anthropological chapters gripped me, but I admit some of the chapter on usury I skipped--now we're on to Walt Whitman and I'm back once again entrenched.



It occurs to me that profuse poets--Hyde calls them "enthusiasts"--at least the famous ones of this ilk--are male. Neruda Whitman Ginsberg Blake. Whereas the poets I am pulled to these days are fairly restrained and are female--Elizabeth Bishop would be my prime example. Dickinson wrote a lot, but the poems themselves are restrained. I can't think of many women who are profuse. Is this because we are self-doubters?



Says Whitman: "I too knitted the old knot of contrareity."



Here and there with dimes on the eyes walking,

To feed the greed of the belly the brains liberally spooning,

Tickets buying, taking, selling, but in to the feast never once going,

Many sweating, ploughing, thrashing, and then the chaff for payment receiving,

A few idly owning, and they the wheat continually claiming.



Profuseness does not suit memory, though, however profuse is the grass.

But you can dance on the lawn, I will admit. Reading this makes me want to write to my friend from so long ago, which is the point I guess. The book is subtitled "Imagination and the Erotic life of Property," eros being the coming-together of separate things, and logos implying the discerning of their differences.



But I am not an enthusiast and would never go to a church where I was supposed to shout and dance. It was interesting to me that Hyde notes that rich people do not do this. Poor people do.