Yes, I've found this works well with Geoffrey Hill. Strange though how I
haven't yet managed to use the technique to get to grips with Prynne ...
joanna
----- Original Message -----
From: "Dominic Fox" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Tuesday, April 17, 2007 5:38 PM
Subject: Re: A Shorter Book Of Hours (part 2 of 3)
>I think something interesting happens when allusiveness overruns the
> ability of any reader, even the most diligent/tolerant, to pick up all
> the threads or fashion a consistent whole out of them - or when it
> disappears off down mouseholes so far from the sphere of public
> letters that one would have to be a particularly obsessive kind of
> stalker-biographer to find them out.
>
> What you get then is a kind of sensuous enigma, something with an
> immediately "accessible" facade that is at the same time porous and
> honeycombed: not "well-grounded" or referentially secure but
> nevertheless having a structure, an independent integrity of its own.
>
> But one has to dispel somehow the anxiety that the "references" in the
> poem really are resolvable, if only the reader were clever enough (or
> sufficiently in the know), and the resentment that tends to go along
> with that anxiety. It's only "wilful obscurity" if it's obscurity
> itself that's being willed, rather than the play of light among the
> fragments.
>
> Dominic
>
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