Dear Ali,
I quote this quite often:
'The question is always: what is the meaning of this language practice; what
values does it propagate; to what degree does it encourage an understanding,
a visibility, of its own values or to what degree does it repress that
awareness?' C, Bernstein.
So my question would be can this question, not only with regard to the
creative component, but also the researched exegesis, be answered in a
school of professional writing? The very doubleness of the your task seems
to raise scary problems. The question is certainly uniformly avoided at
the university where I work, and in most English departments I know about.
Personal bias and what one is good at aside, the epic as you describe is
surely as impossible as Dan Jab's 'logic'? The age refuses it.
Wystan
My PhD is in the school of Professional Writing at Deakin Melbourne. For the
thesis
I'll be handing in a 30,000 word researched exegesis and a 60,000 word
creative
component i.e. the 'epic'.
>Today it seems to me the epic's pretensions place a block on working
>at length, yet working at length is what is interesting (in as much as
>poetry in one page first person bits is what is not interesting). The
>question is: how then to work at length totally without the epic? The
>examples you give fail to do this. Olson was as much a victim of the epic
as
>anyone, and but maybe a more useful one.
Well, I AM biased to say that every long poem will automatically tend
towards a
narrative and every narrative will inevitably tend towards a symbloic
journey of
protagonist/s (even if this protagonist is the narrator itself)so there
really isn't
much of a chance escaping an epic, but that's my personal bias. Seeing past
it, I'd
say a work in length needs to allocate its motifs past the human characters
involved
in it. One good example is Andrew Motion's 'Salt water' which flirts with a
mythical
protagonist (the merman) but is actually about the setting and its history.
Or 'Wreck' by the Australian poet Judith Rodriguez. As for Olson's 'Maximus
Poems',
I'll write more to you on that later.
>It is good to take the measure of length in poetry over again--what does
one
>expect it to signify?
I think it is very good to write long poems. A long poem can engage a reader
and
shed off the alienation which most readers feel when they come across a
tight and
brief and ambigious poem. From my experience as a performer, nothing works
better
with an audience than a generous, plain-speaking poetry narrative. I don't
want
to 'signify' anything; as much as I hope to do what I'm good at(here's my
own
problematic ego) and telling a story is just that.
Thanks for your very interesting questions.
Ali
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