Chris Jones's question: 'What is writing?'
is one of those all encompassing queries that I just give up before.
So I'm pleased to have read some of the responses, but can't add much from
my own perspective. I do suspect each of us has a different take on it.
I once probably 'knew' the/an answer, but no longer.
As I no longer 'know' what poems are.
So far as I understand what I do, it goea back to the language, & the
language leads me on.
But that says far too little to really help.
I have been interested recently, talking to some of my writing students,
that the poem that comes to mind when I want to talk about how language
makes the emotion, not the persons experience of it, to show them, once
again (& it is certainly one of the poems I happily return to), Pound's
'The River Merchant's Wife: A Letter' (except it isn't really Pound's is
it): so here we have a most important early modernist poem, in which the
act of translation (even by someone whose knowoedge of Chinese was, to put
it kindly, less than satisfactory) is central, langauge into language. Yet
I never read that poem with out choking up at the end. Not because Pound is
writing out of his experience as a young woman in love, but because he has
found the right words in the right order to create/construct that
experience for the reader. As, in another country at another time, did the
original poet (& perhaps his Japanese translator; I'm not sure of how that
worked or if it did).
Doug
Douglas Barbour
Department of English
University of Alberta
Edmonton Alberta Canada T6G 2E5
(h) [780] 436 3320 (b) [780] 492 0521
http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/dbhome.htm
Speech
is a mouth.
Robert Creeley
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