A "monstrous keg of worms" eh? probably so, and I like
your answer, Doug. It seems to me though that what poetry
has in common with music, aside from the obvious (the aural
effect, the sound a poem makes even read quietly in one's
mind, etc.) is time, it is written in time, and not just in
the obvious sense, but in the same way a piece of music
has a time signature, so that the lyric poem seems to me
anyway to be a single moment in time, though that single
moment may occur simultaneously, as it were, in many
realities, nor is this to say how long a moment is, since
the prophet went to heaven and back in no more than a moment.
But this is very different than "knowing what time it is" in
language, which is often a matter of narrative markers--"then,
now, afterwards," other similar time keeping word, the shifting
of tense from past to present, etc.--and the way in which
chronology and Ken's "linear movement" is kept. By altering
this chronology of narrative markers or erasing it altogether
various realities in the poem can become sort of coterminously
past, present, future or some combination thereof. For instance
I'm thinking of this poem by Vallejo, where the first two lines
are:"The suit that I wore tomorrow/hasn't been washed
by my laundress" where what "has been" becomes a future
loss and the persistence of past love within that future
loss by the end of the poem.
Best,
Rebecca
Rebecca Seiferle
www.thedrunkenboat.com
-----Original Message-----
From: Douglas Barbour <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Oct 7, 2003 8:39 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Caedmon - de Reszke - times past living on
Ken
>
>How, then, do you break what I think of as the "linear prison" of language
>as it's
>commonly used? I'm looking at that question, thinking I've opening a
>monstrous keg
>of worms, but am letting it go because I want to see answers.
One answer, & I do not intend this as a mere clich?, is that all writing
does this by definition. But I think there are many ways of doing so, of
slipping the bonds of time through shifts of perspective, often in fiction,
but I think in poetry too.
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