--- [log in to unmask] wrote:
> And that once produced, the made poem should be
> viewed
> on its own terms and weighed as successful or a
> failure without
> the taint of prejudice toward the poem that has
> sprung, Athena-like,
> fully formed from one's head over the poem
> constructed
> from that ultimate artifice: an exercise.
Constructing a poem as an exercise doesn't preclude
that kind of "listening" to achieve the kind of
"truth/honesty" I'm talking about. In fact I once
wrote a sestina which I started as an exercise but
which "went deeper" and is now one of my favourite
poems in the "truthful" sense.
Another Don Paterson quote - he likes strict forms as
a kind of "intellectual doggy-chew" to keep the
rational brain busy and allow the deeper stuff to come
through. Exactly! I must find that essay :-)
Unfortunately I'm in the throes of moving house and my
life is currently an endless series of cardboard boxes
:-(
I guess what I'm saying (again) is that "listening"
doesn't preclude conscious craft/labour, but that
there has to be a seed crystal of something that
really *needs to be said* at a deeper-than-conscious
level for a poem to work for me. This does relate to
the sense of "poem as discovery" - the poem needs to
tell you something that you perhaps hadn't consciously
acknowledged, but that you recognise profoundly, and
are even changed by. It needs to come from "heart
knowledge" as opposed to pure "head knowledge". I
guess this is my personal manifesto. I think if a
poem has come from heart knowledge, it has more
capacity to sneak in below the reader's busy conscious
mind and really involve/affect them, give them that
precious sense of deep recognition. [Heart knowledge,
after all, is simple, and is the level where we're
more alike than different IMHO (unlike the conscious
level)]. My loyalty to other poets who do this for
me, even if in only one or two poems, is tremendous
and unshakeable. The poems that have "reached" me in
this way make up my own personal canon.
Cheers,
Kona.
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