Simone Weil : ‘Thinking Poetically’

I have been reading the Simone Weil Critique Thinking Poetically for the
last few weeks, interspersed it seems with other activities and work.

In many ways it has prevented me from posting up here because
the subject matter is so imperative to the creation of her poetry; and yet and the Poet/Philosopher’s experiences in Vichy as a woman writer are neither subtle nor intriguing.

Her writing is sometimes painful to read. At the end of this brief
post I shall include the link to Weil’s poem Necessity which I had
published in recognition of the 2009 International Women’s Day.

One of the themes of this site is ‘of waiting’, or to put it more succintly: the writing of
women who are entrapped (intellectually and spiritually) by the prisons their time has brought
them to: many of them , Miriam Tuojimen, Liliana Ursu, Nelly Sachs and Weil were writers that knew the shape of their prisons and created from them the most amazing poetic structures.
The other main theme is visibility of women critics and writers in our society. (always a problem).

There are strong sympathetic links in how prose is constructed between Porete and
Weil, between Julian of Norwich and Weil and I suppose ‘heard in the antiphons of Hildegard of
Bingen. I do not have time to elaborate on the themes, so I thought It would suffice to add
in the Porete links and the link to Necessity and that I would complete this in second part
with some brief notebook excerpts in the coming days.

Thinking Poetically Joan Dargan, State University of New York Press.1999

: Necessity, by Simone Weil.
: Barbro Karlen
: Excerpts from Marguerite Porete.