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
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