Keston writes
>The discussion which Chris entered, on the nature of poetic truth, is of
>course a very old one. Various answers have been given at various points
>in history.
As for another example in Hesiod's Theogony:
The Muses once taught Hesiod to sing
Sweet songs, while he was shepherding his lambs
On holy Helicon; the goddesses
Olympian, daughters of Zeus who holds
The aegis, first addressed these words to me:
'You rustic shepherds, shame,: bellies you are,
Not men! We know enough to make up lies
Which are convincing, but we also have
The skill, when we've a mind, to speak the truth.'
(translated by Dorothea Wender)
On another note I am, shall I say, surprised, as an American, to hear
Sharon Olds' name come up here. My 18 and 19 year old students adore her
work:
In the last days of my father's life
I tried to name his smell--like yeast,
ochre catalyst feeding in liquid,
eating malt, excreting mash--
sour ferment, intoxicant, exaltant, the
strong drink of my father's sweat,
I bent down over the hospital bed
and smelled it. It smelled like wet cement,
a sidewalk of crushed granite, quartz
and Jurassic shale, or the sour odor
of the hammered copper humidor
full of moist, bent, blackish
shreds of pipe tobacco; or the smelling-salts
tang of chlorine on the concrete floor of the
changing room at the pool in summer. . . .
And so on. Very imaginative stuff. I might risk the ever-forbidden
paraphrase: "As I have now the opportunity to write about this life
experience I think I shall remember leaning down and catching a whiff of my
father dying--shall I compare his rotting body to a. . .to a what? Perhaps
to just as many things as I can in all of my splendid poetic imagination
remember or invent. I am after all a poet awash in the sensorium and alert
to the endless power of simile or the power of simile deployed endlessly,
which is, after all, my power. My powers are mighty; I am quite charmed by
my vocation; it compensates for my experience and I mean to show you what I
can do."
These are not convincing lies. This is a form of self-congratulation,
unintentionally comic, as offensive in its perpetuation of the trite
rhythms and structure of a phrase such as "the/strong drink of my father's
sweat" as in the violence done to her father. Compare Faulkner's _As I Lay
Dying_, where the comedy is intentional.
KT
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