Helen and Rebecca
Interesting and useful comments. I feel almost stupid for not thinking
about some of the formal elements of poetry, now that Helen pointed them
out, so many thanks. I went back and read a little more Rimbaud "Une
saison en enfer" and although my French is poverty stricken I could
begin to see this. There is also a connection I can see between
poetry and prose novels which I have a thing for like Gore Vidal's _Myra
Breckinridge_ of which I have a tattered old first edition which was
probably first smuggled into this country illegally. (It was a banned
import when first published.)
The question of time was another aspect I wasn't thinking about.
Narrative and time is one of those things I find problematic and
difficult. Without implying I want to throw out narrative theory
(Seymour Chatman's structuralist narratology or Levi Strauss's theory of
narrative or GS Morson's narrative and freedom in Slavic literature) I
find these theories of narrative present images of time in terms of
movement across space. I was wondering if narrative could be also
understood in terms of direct time images, rather then spatial images of
time. So both narrative and lyric are inside time (rather then the
reverse which has time inside lyric and narrative forms.) I don't have a
solution to this question. (The question arose when I did Deleuze's
Cinema books for a 2nd year undergrad class on theories of the image in
a pass life some time ago and was more connected with film studies then
textual studies.) Anyways, I just wanted to give something back which
shows how useful this comment was, Rebecca.
best wishes
Chris Jones.
On Wed, 2003-01-29 at 11:40, seiferle wrote:
> Dear Chris,
>
> Interesting questions. I remember attending a panel on the lyric poem and then later a panel on the narrative poem and finding the same poems being used as examples! There's so much variance in how the poet defines a lyric versus a narrative poem, particularly if the lyric can, and often does, have narrative elements.
>
> My own feeling about this is that it is a matter of time. That a lyric poem is, for whatever else one may say of it, a single moment of time. And a narrative poem is a movement in time. So I would think that a prose poem, like a poem that is not a prose poem, could be either lyric or narrative. And of course, if it were lyric, it could also contain narrative elements.
>
> Best,
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