as an image of language, a crystal suggests being shorn from time; escaping from history. Entrapment in repetition - the repetition of faces, views. From the opposite view, poetry works against the permafrost of preserved - lexicalised - language.

Is your tutor thinking of Celan, or do they dream of Superman in his ice-crystal fortress of solitude

Edmund

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From: British & Irish poets <[log in to unmask]AC.UK> on behalf of Tim Allen <0000002899e7d020-dmarc-[log in to unmask]>
Sent: 11 December 2017 15:42
To: [log in to unmask]AC.UK
Subject: Re: Crystalline structures

 

I agree with your tutor Luke, whoever he/she is, that sometimes a poem can be said to have a crystalline structure or whatever, but not always, and such a thing certainly doesn't mean that it has to be a condition of being the best. I'd consider some of mine to be crystalline in this way, or approximate such a thing in the way the language refracts language etc. (yes hoaxed might cover it) but some isn't like that at all. I think I've always considered Prynne's stuff to be crystalline - complexity in the form of hard luminosity etc.

Cheers

Tim

  

On 11 Dec 2017, at 15:16, Luke wrote:

I just mean to read, another vacuous question then. My tutor said this today, that a good poem is

> something which contains its beginning in its end and vice versa. At its best a poem is somewhat crystalline in character, something in which you can find pathways and developing patterning when you read a second time.

I wondered, how does that fit with your poetic ideals, at all? Hoaxed artlessness could cover it, too?