Dear M.F.,
MF wrote:
>The intricacies of prose come directly from
>speech - take the sermon, for example,
>particularly the sermon in the black Baptist
>traditions (eg Martin Luther King). Sermons
>were particularly rife among early English
>prose, even in Anglo-Saxon.
What is the difference, then, in your mind, between prose and poetry? I
don't think prose has the metrical or musical organization that poetry
has. And I think that organization stems originally from oral
poetry. Yes, prose may also stem from speech - but not usually from
singing or musical speech. I am not saying prose is not or cannot be
intricate & formalistic - all I'm saying is that it does not stem in the
same way from the musical declamation or singing of archaic poetry.
>MF quoted H:
> > Another thing I'm trying to say is that Mandelstam's
> > understanding of the moral status of the poet (remember, as
> > summarized/simplified & perhaps dogmatized by his widow) is >
>perhaps a
> > late
> > emergence of a very old sense of the poet's physical presence,
> > "standing
> > by" his word, in a sense that differs from the
> > alienation/objectivization
> > of writing/books.
>& MF replied:
>Even when the writer is standing there reading
>it to you? Even when what the writer is reading
>is closely connected to the here-&-now
>concerns of the audience?
If you want to bring a book into the immediacy of an audience & recite it,
as happens often in synagogues and churches, then you are approaching the
kind of presence I'm talking about with ancient poetry. But that is not
the ordinary usage of books as we know it today.
>MF:
>It sounds as though Mendelstam and Milton, at
>least, were anxious for social/cultural authority,
>and attempted it by claiming virtues they invented
>& ascribed to antique poetic models (Milton)
>or modes (Mendelstam).
That's a nicely suspicious postmodern theory. I think Mandelstam and
Milton (both of whom composed partly by the ear and the voice) come across
as classicizing and archaizing poets simply because, in their orally-based
verses, they re-present the actual, physical embodiment of musical harmony
in poetry. This is indeed a kind of anachronistic event. The poet brings
the listener into THEIR time.
>MF:
>Poets didn't invent story-telling - it's there in
>animal cries of warning, in crows plotting to
>steal the bits of food stashed away by other
>crows (a very recent observation, that, the first
>definite plotters in the animal kingdom).
How do you know those crows aren't poets?
>MF:
>But "our culture" is not the whole world. Prose
>developed in other places (e.g. Japan) independently
>of Milton & Proust & Joyce & their models.
That's not news to me. I would however be interested to know more about
the relation between early poetry & the development of prose narrative in
non-western cultures. I wouldn't be surprised if the same paradigm of oral
singing & scripted, recursive exile narratives is found there too.
Henry
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