Alison wrote:
>Tim wrote:
>
>>Because how can we separate what we
>>are reading with our vision - however constructed - of its author.
>
>Me, I don't have trouble, but it's no doubt a result of a chaotic bad
>habits from childhood. That is, I'd read poems and remember them, but
>forget entirely or not notice in the first place who the author was. I'm
>not saying it's in any way a superior way to think of poems, just that I
>did think of them as just that, artefacts of words in which the maker's
>thumbprint was not primarily relevant; and as I've got older, and become
>more organised, there is still a whiff of that in my reading. Poetry for
>me always aspires to a condition of anonymity.
I was thinking along similar lines in relation to this thread. My
benchmark for reading seems to come from those days.
The complete absorption in an imaginary world.
While accessory stuff = barnacles attached to an aging
hulk. The jaded deliquescence of reading.
The Bloodaxe volume of Elena Shvarts in translation initiated a whole
new era for me. So I'm grateful for that. As for the cult
of self & personality in poetry, or (on the other hand) its programmatic
proscription: I think self-realization is sort of an irreducible &
substantial aspect of reality. But it's a dialectical, prudential-
contemplative phenomenon - immeasurable from any "outside". Self-
realization is exactly that: unique, unnaccountable. & dialectical in
that "you must lose your life to find it" (or however it goes). The
impersonality of art reflects that dialectic. The cult of
personality, the marketing of personality, is just a sell-out
of self-realization. An erzatz shortcut. yes, poetry aspires
to a condition of anonymity.
Henry
>
>
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