Hi all
While we're quoting, I thought I'd post some extracts from Brian Coffey on
poetry and communication, to which I referred in passing a few weeks back.
These quotes are from an interview with Parkman Howe sometime in the 70s.
The question to which Brian was responding was: 'You have often said that
you do not aim to communicate in your poetry.'
'Well, I want as a platform, if one is talking about poetry, that poets do
not write in order to communicate. And if they do put themselves in the
position of being communicators, then they are propagandists.....
But what is communication? ...you have a sending device, you have a
receiving device, and you have a medium for sending, and a bit of
information: something like, say, the letter _o_. It goes in to the sending
device and it is despatched so it is reproduced whole and entire, _o_, at
the other end.... Now nothing has occurred really....
...what happens when one encounters a new poem? Well, there is
non-understanding to begin with, and, one hopes, non-preconception...
Now. in such meetings there is not communication. There is something quite
different going on that is extremely tentative on both sides. The
tentativeness is something which has a long future ahead of it. It may end
in rejection, it may end in something else.'
Billy
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