>do you think that sometimes this kind of ventilation, these linebreaks
>serves to heighten, make vivid? I think this "poetry" often allows us to
>move out with the experience, through regions of thought. for the lines to
>be poetry, however, they must be charged, fitted with breath, rhythm. and
>they can never be not of their own. the end of their work is the end of
>ours...the poem. everywhere in the piece we go we have to feel a sounding
>made, something hallowed, hard-won, endeared as experience, and so to us,
>through what some other has made of it, has landed on, laid claim to by
>discovery. So, the litmus seems to be: if the poet and reader get to that
>place via the poem, that's where they want to be, and those lines are a
>poem. Otherwise not.
>bst, Gerald Schwartz [log in to unmask]
It might, but you're talking, mit seems to me, about what we usually think
of as poems. I'm not going to open that can of worms, as I no longer have
any fixed idea of what a poem is, . . . however, I still seem to have some
ideas of what it isn't, & on the whole, despite their occasional snarky
attempts at 'wit,' (failing ones, for this reader), the one-word-per-line
harangues we've been getting don't cut it for me. And one major reason is
that they are rather simple sentences cut up so.
This may or may not be a proper response to your query. But if you;re
looking for 'thought' in a poem, I could easily recommend some poems that
think hard, move fast, & take a reader deep: say many of Ann Carson's, or
the hard workings of a Susan Howe, or, or, . . .
Douglas Barbour
Department of English
University of Alberta
Edmonton Alberta Canada T6G 2E5
(h) [780] 436 3320 (b) [780] 492 0521
http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/dbhome.htm
What's received's given out
in smaller measure. The speaker as hearer
comprehends what he can't
say, a music of what sounds him.
Wayne Clifford
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