Nicholas,

You have made some wonderful observations! Your restatement of my original
unfolds the layers of personal engagement with 'the poem/language' in cogent
detail not the least statement being:

> I enjoy to believe that deep experience Follows the poetic line, as
> well as drives it. It's an arbitrary distinction: do I write from  my
> experience or toward it? Writing from the familiar to make it new
> becomes writing untethered to any familiar at all - charged, so to
> speak, with the task of making meaning.

I was making this very point in conversation over breakfast with my
daughter, Trinity (a poet in her own right), as we sorted out our different
approaches to writing between bites of pancakes (her) and French toast (me).
Yet we both had fresh strawberries on our meals! Which is to say, in my
opinion observing her story approach to poetry as opposed to my tracking the
lines charge toward their Bethlehem as an act of divination, that what makes
her work excel is an economy of language (if grace=an economy of
motion=dance  then so does grace=an economy of language=poetry...quite
possibly?) Our commonality is an awareness of the power of well chosen
words, knowing what is enough for the poetic lift.

In an interview with Ed Sanders by Lisa Jarnot in a back issue of The Poetry
Project (http://www.poetryproject.com/) Ed Sanders was speaking of the poet
Charles Olson:
"...and his perception that one insight must lead directly to another, and
his metaphor of the poem as a high energy construct, where the mind receives
energy, or it's like a high energy grid, so that the mind reading it
receives this energy as it proceeds down the page. So what that's saying is
to charge your language with energy, to work on it so that it doesn't have
any points where it doesn't discharge that energy, or that élan, or dare we
use the word beauty."

As to Poe, give me a minute to recoup my strength (that book is somewhere
and my brain hurts, I'm home just after surgery). Maria and Martin have
jumped in handily in the meantime (kudos to both).

Again, thank you for your marvelous observations, Nicholas,
:fp

***************
Frank Parker
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http://now.at/frankshome


----- Original Message -----
From: "Nicholas Sergeant" <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Sunday, May 13, 2001 6:45 PM
Subject: Re: Prose poem


> Frank
>
> regarding your
> > That's how I feel about Edger Allen Poe's stories/prose. He writes
> wonderful
> > run-on sentences full of alliteration/the music of syllables and
> sense.
> would you point me in the direction of stories you have in mind? I
> have enjoyed Poe while studying his work some years ago but have not a
> clear sense of that aspect of his prose. I recall the writing felt
> somewhat "symptomatic" of something below the surface, working through
> it, (something it would perhaps even be unsettling - as a reader - to
> admit too much sympathy for - at least challenging in that sense). I
> would guess Poe's writing attracts a lot of psychoanalytical attention
> ("treatment"?).
>
> > My favorite definition of poetry is Pound's "Poetry is language
> charged with
> > meaning". Poe's prose and I think the best of 20th century verse (of
> any
> > form) accomplishes the release and passage of energy from author to
> reader
> > via language so charged that words, their being, are the alchemical
> > catalyst, the powder keg, the place of nuclear fusion.
>
> Dynamite...That's a very good working out of the meaning of "charged".
> It implies a virtually chemical force operating when language is doing
> what it does best, and something irresistibly expansive, insisting on
> far-reaching effects, on taking up much more space than it seems to
> occupy - rather than the opposite extreme of purely logical,
> rhetorical persuasion or expression.
>
> My first thought (or second) was to see "charged" as "charged with a
> difficult but not impossible mission". So if meaning is a "mission",
> like a deep imperative, it feels very active. The mission is not just
> information gathering and reporting (which language does pretty well)
> but it's meaning itself that language is charged with. Not just a
> charge to tell or convey meaning but to Make it happen, so to speak.
> So the image of the alchemical catalyst appeals to me greatly.
>
> I enjoy to believe that deep experience Follows the poetic line, as
> well as drives it. It's an arbitrary distinction: do I write from  my
> experience or toward it? Writing from the familiar to make it new
> becomes writing untethered to any familiar at all - charged, so to
> speak, with the task of making meaning.
>
>
> Nicholas
>