Alison wrote:
>I agree with you about the aspect of the dramatic and the idea of
>enactment (is an art work a re-enactment or a new act, cognition or
>re-cognition? in the same way that you might ask if ritual is always
>a re-newal, an evocation of beginning? cf Paz's ideas about
>primordial rhythm, say - or the way creation myths and rituals are
>theorised by French mythographers -) I feel like quibbling though
>about your metaphor of the "concrete", and whether an art work is
>about "irreducibility". There is too much of the immovable object
>there for me; I'm deeply suspicious of the notion of the ideal,
>perfect work of art, and I value notions of dynamic and fluidity and
>relationship, without in the least wanting to deny the materiality
>of, in poetry's case, speech and language. And mimesis can be argued
>to be much more gesture in motion than fixed representation, a static
>"mirror", as the Western world came to understand it in the past few
>centuries.
Valid points, Alison. But for irreducibility and concreteness I don't mean
to suggest solidity, exactly. Experience, reality also involve infinity,
uncertainty, variety, unknowability. . . and maybe by mimesis I was
thinking more of plot. Not a mirror but something turning around a point
of change or resolution. So the experience of understanding something, of
insight, can have a dramatic aspect - in fact this experience may lie
behind the drama of conflicting characters, and may be the one experience
actually shared by the protagonist and the audience. So the poem
re-presents the drama of achieving insight about something particular and
real, some emotional-intellectual complex which involves & engages the
whole person.
I can sense people's irritability rising as I burble on about poetry in
general. But I would go back to my previous comments to Anastasios. My
point here is that a poem as art re-enacts, dramatizes, some experiential
whole which is irreducible to a ready-made intellectual
boilerplate. Fashions in school poetry are built upon such intellectual
Cliff's Notes. The "plot" of insight is built upon the poem's openness to
the undeniable, the inexplicable, the overwhelming, the real.
Henry
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