“Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, you are
just the ash.”
Leonard Cohen
**************************
Frank Parker
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http://frankshome.org
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Poetryetc provides a venue for a dialogue relating to poetry and
> poetics [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Alison Croggon
> Sent: Saturday, February 19, 2005 11:49 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Audience / poems on walls
>
> Thanks for the Hamill quote, Richard.
>
> I'm not sure about the "speaking for", although it's often done, nor the
> transcendent self. If a poem "speaks for", it's about a confluence of
> experience rather than intent. I do think the I is an Other, though, and
> necessarily estranged and made anonymous by the aesthetic of writing.
>
> I am prompted to paste something from an essay I wrote several years ago:
>
> "Who is the poet?
>
> "Firstly, the poet is a fiction. The poet has nothing to do with the
> quotidian self who bears children, buys the milk, scrubs the cupboards,
> yells at her partner and forgets to do the tax return.
>
> "That person is irrelevant to literature, although it might appear that
> the
> poet writes about nothing else. Allen Ginsberg's łKaddish˛ is not a great
> poem because it tells us about his mother, his homosexuality, the
> Diaspora,
> his childhood, madness or loss. If he wished merely to confess these
> things,
> he could more easily have written a diary. But he didn't: he wrote a poem,
> and a poem obeys other, less easily defined imperatives.
>
> "The conflation of the quotidian self with the poet is the beginning of
> the
> death of understanding. Poetry is not therapy, nor autobiography, nor
> documentation, nor politics, nor a theoretical arena: although of course
> it
> may disguise itself as all these things.
>
> "The poet is the self who writes poetry. The link between the poet and the
> quotidian self is the body. The difference is poetry. Although one is not
> the other, it is impossible to separate them. Neither of these putative
> selves have anything to do, yet, with the idea of a reader.
>
> "The quotidian self is of minor interest and is nobody's business except
> the
> poet's."
>
> I sometimes think half the business of writing is the making up of the
> writer.
>
> Best
>
> A
>
>
> Alison Croggon
>
> Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
> Editor, Masthead: http://masthead.net.au
> Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com
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