Re Aileen's reservations concerning notes, often notes are not notes,
they're an integral part of the poem.
In English-language poetry, Olson's 'Maximus' poems incorporate
geographical/historical notes as asides into the text. Laurie Duggan's
much-neglected 'The Ash Range' (1987) does likewise. Even Zukofsky's
monumental 'A' can be read as a smoothing out of hundreds of different
textual discourses into a composite text.
Also, what about Charles Reznikoff's 'Testimony... Recitative[s]'? Here
is text/prose/notes/testimony as poetry, but with a conscious intention
to adhere as closely as possible to the original narratives. Harold
Stewart's 'By the Old Walls of Kyoto' has an accompanying prose text
that I feel is more poetic than the highly-rhymed 'poetic' text.
If we look at foreign-language poetry, what about the vast reservoir of
Hebrew Holocaust poetry? Much of this body of work is prose narrative
rethought as poetry but not necessarily recast as poetry. In Japanese,
Irisawa Yasuo's celebrated 1968 long poem, 'Waga Izumi Waga Chinkon' (My
Izumo My Requiem), has 158 separate notes appended as a kind of parody
of Eliot's 'Wasteland' but the notes are integral to the poetic
narrative, and I read them as poetry, given that they mostly quote
poetry anyway.
Since the nineteenth century, surely the distinction between poetry and
other forms of textual narrative has been blurred in poetic practice to
the point where strict divisions or proscriptive rules are unworkable.
Leith Morton
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Leith D. Morton
Professor of Japanese
Head, Department of Modern Languages
University of Newcastle, NSW
Australia
http://www.newcastle.edu.au/department/lg/morton.html
Ext. 61 249 21 5360. Fax. 61 249 21 6949
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