looking in all the wrong places

The scholars scour the poet’s archive for personal anecdotes, familial first causes, and everything else quotidian and pedestrian that the poet attempted to transcend when writing.

potential halo

Husserl’s descriptions of what constitutes a world, with its inner horizons of what is perceived and known and its outer regions of the unperceived and unknown, resonate with poetic intimations of the power that resides within everydayness and informs the way ordinary things admit a horizon, suggesting another side of reality, unseen within our habitual quotidian regard. The poetry of both Rilke and Robert Frost intimates another side of things beyond the world’s inner horizons, suggesting not so much a radical mysticism, but a view that the mysterious and unknown remain relevant to our everyday life, as a potential halo surrounding the most ordinary things and experiences. When the mysteriousness is acknowledged the ordinary look of things is radically transformed; for these poets this means that they are seen more truly in a reality of greater and more intensely magnified dimensions than our ordinary habits of perception allow.

—Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei, The Ecstatic Quotidian (Penn. State Univ. Press, 2007)

daily record

Like a ship’s log while in port, poem after poem, quotidian entries of little import.