-----Original Message-----
From: Trevor Joyce <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>
Date: 03 January 2004 17:17
Subject: Re: Niedecker review
>I'm guessing that there are two, related elements: a constant
>alertness to the grain of things, often small, 'insignificant'
>things, happening in the world, and an equivalent attention to the
>tiniest effects of sound in language. The latter seems to create a
>still space in which the former can proceed.
YES, YES!!
I don't really know how
>Niedecker should sound. In many another poet, that's not very
>important, as the main action of the work may rely relatively little
>on the sound values, but in the case of Niedecker I feel I may be
>losing out badly.
>
>And yet, despite, the poems are wonderful . . .
Yes. Don't we have that problem too with poems of the past. What did
Coleridge sound like? Langland. I'm just picking names slightly randomly.
I'd like to hear Traherne, and Herbert and Donne... Dunbar...
With some one has a better idea than of others
There are poems of the past and from regions other than mine where, to use
your words Trevor, I really have little idea how it should sound, & where I
found myself caught up in the sound
I *think - and I'm offering myself to be knocked down here, I want to get it
right - that it's not so much THE SOUNDS but more the transitions of sounds,
the changes, the variety, and that survives being mauled by my London mouth
and inner ear
as with a piece of music one can greatly love only to be told by someone
who's got hold of the original score that it hasnt been played properly in
decades
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