At 12:46 PM -0800 20/2/02, Rebecca Seiferle wrote:
>The
>prolongation and, as it were, consummation of her will
>toward a golden world is as veracious an account as I
can give of my motive to art. . .
>Yes, I have insisted...on the notion that it is
>_precisely_ her speech. . . I feel about poetry that
>it is a demonized activity, that it is not. . . the
>speech of a mortal or merely singular person. Poetry
>in _my_ view has its power because it is the speech
>not of an individual but of another who is more than
>and different from the individual."
Rebecca, I find this quotation totally bizarre and a little creepy -
I guess he means "daemonic" rather than "demonized"? (I doubt
poetry's important enough to be "demonized".) It has elements of
Psycho about it.
I find Lorca's idea of the duende useful when I want to think in
impersonal terms or want to find a way to describe that sense that
writing poetry goes beyond the conscious quotidian self - but from my
recollection Lorca describes duende, which is certainly daemonic
given that the duende are originally a kind of malign pixy, is an
expression of the destructiveness of creativity - that is, an
abstraction of an inner process, rather than an appeal to a kind of -
exterior immortality??? Thinking of Shakespeare's Sonnets, where
there are many appeals to immortality, the immortality exists only in
the language, where the beloved and the lover's love are preserved
forever despite the acknowledged corruption and mortality of the
flesh - but it's an "individual" speaking, however fictional, and
most clearly a fleshly individual.
Hmmm.
I'll have a coffee now to dispel the creeps.
Best
Alison
--
Alison Croggon
Home page
http://www.users.bigpond.com/acroggon/
Masthead online
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