My attempts to answer Adrian's (actually very stimulating) questions
foundered, and I'm left with three or four aphoristic fragments quite
remotely connected to what he was talking about. I thought I'd chuck them
in here in case they are of some remote interest to someone out there. And
they do devolve around the topic possibly still in progress, "creating
readers".
1. Ancient Japanese poetics tabulated some dozen different kinds of linkage
or allowable modes of progression between entities (words) (especially, but
not exclusively, in 'linked verses'). These included linkage by allusion,
by mood, by sound, by unexpectedness, by occultation and by capriciousness.
So there's nothing new about a lot of that (though probably no one thought
of "linkage which doesn't link by any stretch of the imagination" before
us). I don't see any reason why outlandish or illogical forms of
connectivity should repel readers, they never have. Isn't it a sense of why
it is being done, the negativity, which puts people off? People say "I
don't understand" but what they mean is "I am under attack."
(1a) . Why should a poem want to "supplant norms"? Who could be so
presumptuous as to know better than almost everybody?
2. (towards the end of a long and tiring paragraph)..... Well, it's my
belief that textual recognition is intuitive, and is the basis of poetic
transmission. You recognise things because you too are a human being
sharing the impedimenta of existence, and for no other reason. The more
"kinds'"of recognition the better, so that the ensemble transgresses the
terms of your particular spot. If you have the recogniton you have the
reader, in principle. But I realise too that recognitions can be
inculcated, and I think it is safer not to. And recognitions which would
naturally occur can be closed, by specific teaching or by cultural
absorption.
>Have you never found that a text has resisted all your efforts to engage it
at a certain point and years later discovered that your life and/or reading
experience in the interim has equipped you to respond to it with
understanding if not pleasure?
3. Of course. But not only in the form of a difficult, advanced or
perplexing text becoming readable as if the world and time have caught up
with its mode; also as with a perfectly ordinary, even conventionally
conceived text which repelled attention for that reason, revealing at a
later time that it had its own authenticity, that it moved forwards in its
own mode. I had a particularly disturbing experience of this kind with a
poem, an elegy, by (of all people) Peter Levi. This occured in a rural bed
& breakfast near Porthmadoc. I think that if we don't remain open to that
kind of reversal, we've had it. We've simply had it.
/PR
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