Oh hell, Anny, it seems to've gone silly buggers. Will suss it out when
I've more time.
Meanwhile, I KNOW petcers will enjoy today's George Szirtes blog bcuz it
begins with Tom Lehrer's "Masochistic Tango". ;-)
http://www.georgeszirtes.co.uk/index.php?page=news
Hope it works!
Best,
Judy
***********************************
"Southern hospitality has ten years left."
---------Jeff Hecker, Norfolk, VA, USA
************************************
----- Original Message -----
From: "Anny Ballardini" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Sunday, June 15, 2008 7:30 AM
Subject: Re: Poem: The Uncovering Wait
> Is the link right? I cannot open it, thank you, Anny
>
> On Sun, Jun 15, 2008 at 2:32 AM, judy prince <[log in to unmask]>
> wrote:
>
>> Thanks, K; I'm glad to know you liked it---but I must disagree with wot
>> you
>> say about your own poetry.
>>
>> You may find some of the following excerpts fascinating, taken from:
>>
>> http://www.poetrylibrary.org.uk/new/poetryscene/?id=168
>>
>> Excerpts:
>> Poetry Scene News
>> George Szirtes' TS Eliot Lecture 2005 | 23-Nov-05
>> Thin Ice and The Midnight Skaters
>>
>> <snip>
>>
>> The intention of the poet is to write the best possible poem starting out
>> with some as yet incoherent perception relating to an experience or set
>> of
>> experiences. The poet is a person who has realized that language is not a
>> tool but a medium: and, what is more, assumes - has to assume - that the
>> instinctive reader knows this as well as he does. The poem explores the
>> medium by executing a kind of dance across it. It sets out across the ice
>> and begins to cut light patterns in it, following some trainable instinct
>> about the direction and way of moving, the notion of meaning arising out
>> of
>> the motion of the dance as a series of improvisations on the pattern.
>> These
>> patterns present the poet with a number of apparently arbitrary
>> possibilities at any one time. But that is the very nature of language:
>> it
>> is what language continually does. The poet's patterns, the twirls,
>> wheels
>> and whips of the dance, invite the chance interventions of language: you
>> end
>> a line with the word houses, say, and you are soon invited to consider
>> the
>> possibility of trousers or blouses or almost anything that carouses.
>>
>> <snip> Rhymes, stanzas, metres and other such apparent
>> superfluities are not just mnemonics or forms of showboating and
>> grandstanding: they remind us that new patterns spring out of accident
>> and
>> that accident, like nakedness, is part of our condition. It is an
>> accident
>> that article should rhyme with particle, or intellectual with henpecked
>> you
>> all, and Byron uses both in his great comic poem Don Juan. The fancier
>> the
>> rhyme, the funnier and more miraculous it is, but any rhyme is an
>> accident
>> waiting to happen; any rhyme is a trick of light in the ice that draws
>> our
>> attention to the ice. Rhymes are satisfying yet dangerous: they take us
>> to
>> the very edge of nonsense, to the thinnest part of the thin ice where
>> intentionality has to accommodate itself to the world as it is, where in
>> order not to fall through you have to keep moving.
>>
>> <snip>
>>
>> T.S. Eliot, in whose name this lecture is being given, once said that
>> poetry in his time had to be difficult. I don't think he meant it had to
>> be
>> deliberately obscure or only soluble with difficulty, like a crossword
>> puzzle. I think he meant that life was difficult and complicated, and
>> that
>> as poets came to know ever more about it through being obliged to observe
>> and understand events of immense scale and complexity, they would be
>> compelled to make a whole of out fragments and shards. Difficulty wasn't
>> the
>> aim: it was the condition.
>>
>> <snip>
>>
>> Poetry does not console through what it tells: if it consoles at all it
>> does so by creating marvellous, hopeful-yet-hopeless verbal structures of
>> some sort. We may not be able to do anything about death, sickness, loss
>> and
>> pain but look: we can do this! We can make a shape that absorbs us, into
>> which we may sink the energy of our loss. We can transcend private grief
>> by
>> creating firm impersonal events in language, events that begin to look
>> like
>> works of nature. Shelley may cry that he falls upon the thorns of life,
>> he
>> bleeds, but it is not the specific historical figure of Shelley who falls
>> and bleeds for us: it is the human capacity to fall and bleed, to shape
>> out
>> of falling and bleeding something that appears as a shape in the
>> language:
>> the figure a poem makes, said Frost. The figure the skater makes in the
>> ice.
>>
>>
>>
>> --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> Best,
>>
>> Judy
>>
>> ----- Original Message ----- From: "kasper salonen" <[log in to unmask]>
>> To: <[log in to unmask]>
>> Sent: Saturday, June 14, 2008 4:32 AM
>> Subject: Re: Poem: The Uncovering Wait
>>
>>
>> I like it very much Judy; it's a poem I wouldn't be ashamed to read
>> aloud,
>>> which is more than I can say for my own poetry.
>>> and quite a Yeats piece too, thanks. :)
>>>
>>> KS
>>>
>>>
>>>
>
>
> --
> Anny Ballardini
> http://annyballardini.blogspot.com/
> http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome
> http://www.moriapoetry.com/ebooks.html
> I Tell You: One must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing
> star!
>
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