At 8:25 AM +0000 1/15/03, Chris Emery wrote:
>I'm completely with Bunting on this one. The music, the rhythm and the
>syntax -is- the poetry -- so the content isn't the "what's being said" bit
>-- though that can be interesting too -- but it's the how it's being said
>that's hold the poem together -- but the delivery system is something else
>again -- perhaps all these things are inseparable, at least in some cases.
>And then there's the performance of all this -- which can be vital too. But
>I always come back to the "Great. What did she say exactly?" type of
>questions. Art, after all, is a question of precision. [Ho ho.]
I have never been able to separate content from form, as if a poem is
something into which one pours "meaning" or "communication". That
image doesn't make sense to me. The "meaning" of a poem exists as
much in its emotional and associational effects as in any agreed
semantic meaning of the words.
That is: out of the impulse that generates a poem, which for me is a
kind of inarticulate physical desire I associate with a taut feeling
somewhere in my tummy, comes a rhythm which generates a complex
series of mental processes which (hopefully) result in poetry.
It's quite interesting as a comparison to deal with language which
seeks to make words mean just one unambiguous thing: for instance, I
recently wrote the constitution for the incorporation of a theatre
company. The process has its own fascination, because that kind of
precision is something language does not want to do, and the
insistence that it does is what makes that language "dry". Which
suggests that poetry which does the opposite (ie inviting all the
semantic chaos of language in to play) is somewhat incontinent. The
skill exists I suppose in a kind of controlled incontinence, which is
perhaps where questions of form and medium come in.
Best
A
--
Alison Croggon
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