I think on the whole I'm agreeing with you, Henry. Perhaps I am wary
of poetry being nailed to Truth, and all its pleasure sacrificed; I
am no doubt too instinctively pagan. And I am certainly suspicious
of most ideas of heroics and heroism. But I have no problems with
the idea that poetry is an embodiment - in the most carnal sense that
can be possibly applied to language - of joy . As for returns: I
often think of that beautiful short story by Borges about the blind
man remembering his first childish kiss and his soldier games; the
blind man being, of course, Homer, and these simple experiences being
the seeds of the Iliad and the Odyssey.
Best
Alison
>Alison, I think if you read Freud or Rene Girard you'll see there is
>no innocence in storytelling. though it can be sly & subversive in
>an innocent way.
>
>By moral presence I'm sorry I didn't mean moralizing presence. I
>was thinking more of Pushkin or Mandelstam in the context of a
>corrupt, repressive, parasitical official culture (aristocratic or
>revolutionary)- the shock of free expression.
>
>Of course we don't see the "personal presence of the author" in
>Homer, exactly - but the creation of the poem itself is the heroic
>great-souled geste which trumps & encompasses all the heroism it
>narrates. I see the growth of poetry involving the emergence of
>free speakers who never forget their roots in the servanthood of
>paid jongleurs & wandering bards & minstrels. The Turkish word for
>the singer of tales is "asik", which means "lover", and the Uzbek
>epic poet accompanies his songs on the 2-stringed dombira (the horse
>to his rider). We are talking about a kind of immediate embodiment
>of joy in speech which prose writing perhaps puts at a certain
>distance and to which poetic writing is always attempting a return,
>out of the perennial (original?) exile at the root of the Homeric
>cycles & the Bible & the Divina Commedia & Paradise Lost. all of
>these works - whether it's Dante longing for Florence or Joyce
>thinking about Ireland or Proust reconstructing his childhood or t!
>he post-Doric Greeks in Asia thinking back to Mycenae or the Hebrews
>hanging up their lyres by the rivers of Babylon - all of them are
>fundamentally returns.
>
>Henry
--
"The only real revolt is the revolt against war."
Albert Camus
Alison Croggon
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