 |
 |
Alison Croggon wrote: There's the one I was going to write until I read The Descent of Alette... Well, I'm sorry you didn't write it, since something else would have come to my blank mind. I wonder how often this happens that a poet is, in a sense, silenced by the mastery of another poem? for it seems that such a poem does have a certain silencing affect. But perhaps not, for I remember a couple of poets saying that there were some poets who inspired or prompted one to write, of whom one might guess are poets like Whitman and Neruda, and there were others who didn't, perhaps Dickinson and Vallejo (and I'm just guessing from the lack of poems titled "variations on Vallejo") but perhaps they were just making excuses for listening and then scribbling in their notebooks while at a poetry reading. Perhaps they were actually drawing funny doodles of the poet reading or making grocery lists. And perhaps it's a tempermental thing, just as some poets' writing is prompted by their reading, and others is not. I also have heard poets express a kind of relief when they came across a poem on a subject they meant to write, a relief that someone else has written it and so well that they were excused from it. Still, for all this response is so undecided in its either/or, it seems to me that there is some more serious question about poetry buried in it. Perhaps it isn't so much that poetry always speaks, but that sometimes it creates a sort of living silence, Best, Rebecca Rebecca Seiferle www.thedrunkenboat.com