I too have had a go at non-endings from time to time. I think it works in
yours, but my slight doubt as to whether you intended it was due to the
rather hit-and-miss character of email as a medium (people pressing wrong
buttons etc). The first poem I ever read that uses this device was 'Leaving
the Rest Unsaid' by Robert Graves. I've just found it on the Web:
http://www.santafe.edu/~shalizi/Poetry/Graves/Leaving_the_Rest_Unsaid
Best wishes
Matthew
[mailto:[log in to unmask]
01443 482856
-----Original Message-----
From: Viv Kitson [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 18 April 2000 16:18
To: Poetryetc
Subject: Re: Conceit
Yes, Mathew, that's where it "really" ends - a last line of "and". At this
time I was going through a phase of writing "anti-poetry" poetry. You
surmise correctly: not only unable to reconcile the themes but unwilling to;
meant to convey that I could go on and on with "glib and conceited"
analogies, metaphors...but to what point? As, I trust, the previous sections
of the poem convey.
Viv
Mathew Francis asked:
> Is that really where it ends? Startling. (I assume it's the poem suddenly
> giving up on its attempt to reconcile these themes.)
>
in response to my:
>
> Life, Death, and some Words about Them
>
> The owl disintegrated, mashed
> in the car's fine-meshed grille.
> My words absolved you from any blame:
> Death is some kind of necessity...
> the bird was blinded by the headlights...
> But you shallow sighs and gulps of sorrow,
> guilt near weeping - welling from some
> core of your being? of your true self?
>
> Dryden called it dying, in a fine conceit;
> and we made love in this dying life -
> should I call it? - or life in death?
> (I paraphrase now Saint Augustine.)
> Anyway, I felt you die later that night,
> coiled and clamped in my thick embrace,
> in some symbolic act of reparation,
> or creation, or something like that.
>
> And now that you too are crushed and broken,
> dead and dying in a hundred minor ways...
> No, those are glib, conceited analogies,
> for I clothe that event in a grab-bag
> of inadequate metaphors and myths: shielded
> by our culture, traditions, inadequacies
> from the raw rankness of that emotion,
> and
>
> October, 1973.
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
|