>
>Someone said to me recently, "All poets must have the desire to communicate
>something. Why on earth would they write otherwise." And I instantly
>thought, I've no idea what I am communicating, and if I did, it would be
>prose. In a way if the meaning of the poem can be successfully paraphrased
>in prose then it's failed for me.
I agree that a good poem can't be successfully paraphrased in prose, but
isn't that because its form is part of the way it communicates, and not
because it's not trying to communicate?
>When one really admires a writer it can be a very dangerous thing. It was a
>symptom of most of my twenties that I was paralysed with affection for some
>poets I can barely read now (Philip Larkin amongst them). A large number of
>people seem to go through this and some come out the other side. It's
>almost
>as if one shouldn't care "too much" about any writer's texts, if one wants
>to write at all.
Anxiety of influence? But I think this is a modern notion. There was a
time when being able to imitate the poets one loved was considered a sign of
one's control of one's instrument.
>Poetry is of course "something", but its conjugations or manifestations are
>seemingly limitless. What I really hate is the use of "poetry" as an
>adjective to define some other mode of production. Like landscape as
>"poetry" or a musical piece described as a "tone poem." It seems terribly
>imprecise. And when folk talk about a novel as "poetic." I wonder what on
>earth they mean?
When a novel is called poetic it almost always means that it is has no plot
and is written in the purplest of self-indulgent prose.
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