Commentaries - February 2014

eohippus labs: Who we are, how we started, and where we think we might be going

by Amanda Ackerman

eohippus labs books
eohippus labs books

Do not wonder how you will do a job, but do it and then wonder how you have done it
I am always thinking about time.  In many ways, we live in terrible times.  Also, it is said that if you travel far enough into the future you will actually go back in time. 

eohippus labs is a short-form literary micropress based in Los Angeles.  I co-edit the press with Harold Abramowitz, who is also someone with whom I write collaboratively, and he is also one of my best friends. 

Romance

Peterloo Masacre
Peterloo Massacre, 1819

I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind. In this mood successful composition generally begins…. — William Wordsworth, "Preface to the Lyrical Ballads"

So first there is the break, the moment that cannot be contained; then time passes, one achieves some distance, one brings the surfeit back into thought, patiently reproduces its intensity but now as representation, as form. One realizes the truth of the original moment, but in a measured way. The measure, the bringing to heel of the original overflow, is precisely Wordsworth’s break between language and real life.