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
>
>
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