Polly wrote:
>A poem
>can also be a process, a filter, something which changes depending on its
>time and audience. I think truthful writing demands that you do to an extent
>treat your self and your life as 'objects': things to be examined and
>perhaps even 'recreated' through the act of writing.
Yes... and no... really, how can you treat your life as an object? As a
poem? I think it would be a mistake. Of course a poem is a process: but
I'm speaking on the most literal level: it is not you.
Keith Tuma articulated for me some discomforts I have with Sharon Olds.
There is something complacent in her poems which is to do with how her
poetic refuses to address the opacities of language: language is simply
assumed to be transparent, in much the same way that naturalism on
television is assumed to be "real", or journalistic reporting is assumed
to be "the truth". In the past few days I've been introducing myself to
Phyllis Webb, a Selected, which I'm enjoying enormously: but what stands
out for me, apart from her intelligence and real feeling, is her
restlessness: how in her early, carefully accomplished work, she became
aware of a membrane, of constrictions in the language she employs, (clear
in her poems, both the constriction and how she is pushing against it)
and then, whoosh! she breaks it! How I admire that! That seems to me to
be truthful.
Best
Alison
Home Page: http://www.fortunecity.com/victorian/bronte/338
Masthead online: http://www.geocities.com/soho/studios/5662
Alison Croggon
PO Box 186
Newport VIC 3015
Australia
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