>
>One of the praisewords I use for poems (or art of any kind) to describe
>that inchoate initial response, the one that is unmistakeable and for me
>at least undeniable, is "real". It's an idiolectic shorthand for quite a
>complex experience which I haven't the energy to tease out; but that's
>the word that first occurs to me.
In the mid-60s my parents took a big step, for them, & enrolled me in
a prep school, because I had been writing book reports about books I
hadn't read and getting "A" grades. My career as a trickster
had just begun. The rich kids & jocks had a phrase in those days
(at school): "it's been real". It was a way of saying goodbye.
A joke for the rest of us (poor non-jocks). "It's
been real". It was 1984. So "real" has a similar meaning for me.
>
>I've been thinking in this way for some years, but to be honest I haven't
>thought of it as "innovative" so much as a desire for language to get
>closer to some kind of emotional accuracy; paradoxically perhaps, for me,
>this often seems only possible with a high degree of artifice. I can't
>see how one can write poetry and _not_ think of it as a "faculty of the
>intellect", not see it as a way of perceiving and understanding the world
>(experience, inner and outer). As is, in its most literal sense, play.
>And quite legitimate.
The high degree of artifice is usually an inspired chess-move or
code-breaking, n'est-ce pas? "Natural" in a supernatural,
serendipitous, uncanny way. & the code-breaking simply an attempt
to describe experience with tools that appear to be impossibly
arcane, overrefined, hoary, literary & stupid. "Life."
Can
>poetry make any difference, anyway? Ultimately I don't see how it can;
>but it does make a difference to _me_.
Ultimately poetry aligns itself with Life, which runs much deeper than
the designs planned for it by any of us, capitalists or Yahwists or
feminists or socialists or organic ranchers. It's an expression of
stratagems of love & misery; it's a testimony to honor beyond all this
piffle. BOTH of those together. That's what the Divina Commedia was
all about. Shakespeare too, Chaucer & Langland & Homer & Virgil.
Not to mention Ariosto.
Henry
|