It's been about 20 months of Sundays since "I" used an "I" in a poem.
"I" find, like the way when a tree falls in a forest to breaks up and rot;
the trunk and branches provide so much more in the way of services to the
creatures flora, fauna and creatures in the surrounding grove (nest matter,
sites for ferns to grow, fertility to the soil, etc.) It's a kind of
vitality that becomes available with an ego's death (bye-bye "I") and the
emergence of multiple beings/identities, etc. Then the "I" is replaced
with the participation of a lyric "eye" (which includes the other senses as
well - sound, smell, etc.) to take in the Whole, while feasting on any
number of kinds of parts, drawing them in, as if a magnet, into multiple
possibilities, ordering and reordering, occasionally coming across the page
in the form of a poem, photograph, song or work of visual art.
Yes, a la Wilde or Croggon, sometimes an evangelical "sincerity" throws the
whole process out of joint.
Stephen V
Walking Theory (Junction Press).
For more, including electornic ordering information, go to:
www.junctionpress.com
At long last is Walking Theory, Stephen Vincentıs observant, large-hearted
poems bundled into book form, engaging architecture, people on the move, the
seasons and other transience, the talk that binds the day:
Goodbye, rhetoric, the desperate,
what can the poem do, walking, step-by-step:
witness, suffer, hope.
Urbane and companionable, rare virtues flaunted here, curbside delight.
Bill Berkson
> Didn't Wilde say that sincerity was the death of art?
>
> If he didn't, I did.
>
> xA
>
> On 6/6/07, kasper salonen <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>
>> too MUCH of a truth, that's probably what gets me sometimes.
>>
>> KS
>>
>> On 05/06/07, Janet Jackson <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>> (Can't keep out of this any longer!)
>>>
>>> An 'I' has its uses, like any other technique.
>>>
>>> I can't see that the gender of the poet makes much difference.
>>> The lyric 'I' itself may or may not have a gender or be perceived
>>> by the reader as having one.
>>>
>>> Is it a fiction? For me, when I use it,
>>> it is *at the same time* a fiction and a deep truth.
>>>
>>> Janet
>>>
>>>> I'd agree wholly with you here, Alison, but was only making the point
>>>> that for me, the 'I' tends to be a problem, & perhaps I would add, it
>>>> can be a problem by now, in what are more trad lyrics, to white male
>>>> poets in the West anyway. I am not really all that interested in those
>>>> USAmerican poets remembering nostalgically their youth, etc.
>>>>
>>>> On the other hand, Robert Creeley (& he's not the only one) found an
>>>> 'I' that was amazingly complicated in some of the ways you mention.
>>>>
>>>> And, yes, it is a fiction, but then how the maker makes it work as one
>>>> is the question, isn't it....
>>>
>>> -------------------------------------------------------
>>> Janet Jackson <[log in to unmask]>
>>> Poems at Proximity: www dot proximity dot webhop dot net
>>>
>>> Our humanity is diminished when we have no mission
>>> bigger than ourselves.
>>> Bono
>>> -------------------------------------------------------
>>>
>>
>
>
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