Castle, Terry (b. 1953)

The Professor and Other Writings

New York

Harper Collins

2010

"After enough angst and pot and lack of sleep the poet's romance-world--so dense with weird archaisms and arcane symbols, bizarre characters, confusing plots and subplots--seemed more and more to allegorize the scary mental maze in which I found myself."

To one degree or another in fact we were stoned for the whole duration of our affair. No wonder that struggling through Spenser's Faerie Queene was proving difficult: I was blotto upside the head. I still have my old paperback copy of Spenser's poem and just looking at it--the pages and pages of bewildering verse in tiny print, the demented little crib notes I've scribbled in the margins--can induce in me a sort of mental seasickness. After enough angst and pot and lack of sleep the poet's romance-world--so dense with weird archaisms and arcane symbols, bizarre characters, confusing plots and subplots--seemed more and more to allegorize the scary mental maze in which I found myself. The traces of my anguish are still to be seen. Like a doomed swain--or else some crushed-out girl in high school--I have inscribed the Professor's initials, I find, next to certain especially excruciating passages. ("As when a Beare hath seiz'd her cruell clawes/Vppon the carkasse of some beast too weake,/Proudly stands ouer....) And at the end of one of Spenser's more gloomy and sententious stanzas--
(pp. 292-3)

Architecture::Maze

Reading

Terry Castle, The Professor and Other Writings (New York: Harper Collins, 2010).

05/18/2011