----- Original Message -----
From: "Chris Jones" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Sunday, July 04, 2010 1:46 AM
Subject: Re: Revised "Used Book"
> On Sat, 2010-07-03 at 09:51 -0400, Frederick Pollack wrote:
>> But
>> often it's dramatically interesting to confront the narrative "he"
>> with the
>> "I" - usually, as here, towards the end.
>
> Yes, I have come across this also. With third person, it seems me, one
> can get around the first person being read as a real personal me.
>
> (Not that I would oppose personal first person lyric.)
>
> Then when first person is used, it is like first person is also third
> person or attached to it.
>
> But isn't this free indirect discourse? I feel a bit brain dead but
> those who know this formal stuff may be able answer. (The only way I
> seem to get to fid is by accident.)
>
Free indirect discourse applies to prose - Flaubert perfected and named it
as a distinctive tool of the modern novel, and Bakhtin, writing about
"polyphony," sees this means as itself the end. I don't think the idea can
be applied directly, or at all, to lyric poetry. In a novel the reigning
"I" or "he / she" serves plot, or whatever narrative tension keeps the
reader reading. In a lyric poem the implied or explicit pronoun is closer
to what the reader feels the poem is about - h/s looks *at, rather than
*through, that pronoun. Much avant-garde poetry tries to banish narrative
voice, or make the reader replace it with his or her own consciousness. But
there are limits, I think, to how far any poetry can do this, or retain
reader interest if it does.
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