Hi Mairead et al
I enjoyed the conference, and many congratulations to the Pymouth team for
getting it all together and keeping it together, although the scheduling
left little time in the sessions for questions.
By the end of the weekend I had some fairly basic questions running around
my head, like what is the relationship between the concepts that try to
explain why poetry is the way it is and the actual words on the page. How
much are the words connected to each other through meaning, and how much are
they connected by a concept of, for example, public language, or for
another, contiguity, or coincidence (I'm leaving sound out of it for the
time being).
If a poem has a series of references to feminine beauty (as did one of Tony
Lopez's poems under consideration) am I supposed to read those back through
the concept of feminine beauty and its cultural and social implications as
expressed through public language relating to beauty or am I supposed to
connect them together and make something specific to the poem out of them.
The simple answer might be both. That is we are constantly in the process of
moving between specific aspects of feminine beauty as expressed in the poem
and general (public) statements and their implications. That the experience
of reading the poem is the movement between. I still find that leaves me
with a difficulty with regard to how much time I spend trying to work out
connections in the specific experience of the poem.
This is really unclear as I write it, and someone might help me out. Does
anyone know what I'm getting at? For those who were there I thought
Mairead's talk/paper was a specific experience. She was cautious about
moving to abstractions or theoretical positions. Whereas others were happier
to base their talk on more conceptual approaches. Andrea Brady, whose talk I
also thought excellent, even went so far as to say that an examination of
the multiple referential possibilities of the words in Raworth's shorter
poetry would 'spoil the joke', suggesting that as readers we needed a kind
of conceptual understanding? Is that right? Or am i misrepresenting her? .
Are these positions incompatible? Does this mean you can't 'enjoy' or
'understand' or 'appreciate' the poetry without knowing the theory?
Shit, this isn't clear at all, sorry, but I'm going to send it anyway.
Ian
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