Ric says:
>In practice, however resistant a work is to this kind of response, it's
>damned difficult _not_ to make some kind of understanding of just about
>anything: look at the way one starts to "interpret" dada, automatic
>writing and the like. We're interpretive beings, albeit falteringly at
>times.
HWWR confounds that attempt at interpretation in the sense that
abstract art confounds visual expectations - it is abstract poetry.
But the fact that words do carry *meaning* in a very literal sense,
makes it hard to treat a poem like an abstract painting, hence the
search for very concrete subject matter in, for example Doug Oliver's
exposition.
> Bunting...opined that the "meaning" of most poems is trivial / banal...
I don't read and re-read Paradise Lost for the story - but for sound,
the rythm, the language. In a sense, modern *difficult*
poetry has just dispensed with the story, and gone straight for the
more abstract effects.
Alan
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