(Apologies if I've sent this before - misunderstanding with Outlook
Express.)
It's true - I was guessing at the presuppositions underlying your opinions,
and am sorry if I got them wrong. I still think there's an unexamined
organicism in your statement that 'it's not OK' to impose closure. But
whether there is or not, why be so prescriptive? Isn't the process of
writing ultimately the concern of nobody but the writer? And how do any of
us know what the 'form' of mind is, let alone how best to gain access to it?
To be honest, what really bugs me is to be told I can't use rhymes because
it's in some way naive. (Equivalent to using a quill?) What matters is how
you use them. I don't think you can have an experimental literature if you
close off half the avenues of experiment before you begin. For myself I find
something very liberating in 'imposed' form - or at least in certain forms
that seem to offer new approaches which I wouldn't have found without formal
constraints.
Best wishes,
Matthew Francis
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01962 853396
-----Original Message-----
From: Mark Weiss <[log in to unmask]>
To: Matthew Francis <[log in to unmask]>
Date: 09 February 1999 00:55
Subject: Re: Openness and Cathedrals
>I don't think I said any of what you impute to me (beginning "this is
>certainly a feasible way to write"). Nor do I think that poetry is a
>substitute for psychotherapy, although it may coincidentally be therapeutic
>at times. I'm not even sure that it's "a direct route in to [my] thoughts
>and feelings," at least that's not why I write.
>I do know, as one who wrote well over a hundred admittedly not very good
>sonnets in his youth, that the process is very different, as are the
>pleasures.
>As to "no form in [my] mind," I think that's precisely wrong. The practice
>of letting the form evolve is in fact the process of discovering the form
>of mind itself as it manifests itself at that often extended moment.
>Finally, as to speed of composition, I suggest you try a quill pen--it's
>ever so much slower.
>
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