----- Original Message -----
From: "Douglas Barbour" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Monday, November 05, 2007 10:45 AM
Subject: more on Mark's concept of writing
& mine, & a lot of others'
I'm reading a ms of Erin Moure's essays, & she is insistent on writing
against the grain, but for language, following it as far as she can
risk.
Anyway, I liked this statement: discussing what she learned working in
a corporation (will wonders never cease?), she says, 'I learned what
poetry was for: not to tell stories or laud the chippie but to query,
listen to language itself, let it pull me, allow it to resonate with
all life's paradoxical splendour.'
Moure also says: 'But poetry is not about creativity or uplifting
people but about risk, great risk, hurtling oneself at the boundaries
of language, ears pressed to the borders of the structure and hearing
its constraints, which also indicate _openings_. Operating at the edge
of our belief about what language can do. Risking that you might not
like or understand the result at first, or for years.'
Not that I can always live up to such ideals, but that they exist.
Doug
Douglas Barbour
11655 - 72 Avenue NW
Edmonton Ab T6G 0B9
(780) 436 3320
http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/
I wonder how "life's paradoxical splendor" manifests itself if not in
"stories."
What does "laud the chippie" mean?
With all due respect, Doug, these quotations strike me as gas.
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