Chris wrote:
> In a way if the meaning of the poem can be successfully paraphrased
>in prose then it's failed for me.
That's pretty close to Paz's definition of poetry (that it can't be paraphrased). And form, surely, has something profoundly to do with that. I get in all sorts of trouble when I discuss these things, because "meaning" is so often confined to semantic meaning, and I think I understand meaning as including also the more involuntary physical and emotional responses which follow the uses of rhythms and other poetic techniques - which seem to me so much part of the emotional field of a poem I can't understand it as separate from the "meaning", and of course cannot separate that from the form.
But even in more tangible terms, form can have a meaning - say, in Catullus' parody of Cicero, which would have no meaning if he wasn't using Cicero's form.
>Poetry is of course "something", but its conjugations or manifestations are
>seemingly limitless. What I really hate is the use of "poetry" as an
>adjective to define some other mode of production. Like landscape as
>"poetry" or a musical piece described as a "tone poem." It seems terribly
>imprecise. And when folk talk about a novel as "poetic." I wonder what on
>earth they mean?
I can understand the idea of a poetic novel - Peter Weiss, Herta Muller, Joyce, Wilson Harris: anyone who makes prose a heightened medium in which the use of poetic devices - rhythm, repetition, embracing metaphor etc - are foregrounded in the text. The idea of a "tone poem" makes as much sense as using musical terms in discussing poetry - ie, sometimes it can be illuminating, but it doesn't really make a lot of sense.
>But as a final thought: Frost's dictum is in essence a capitalist
>regurgitation is it not? it's about confining us to the endless novelty of
>regurgitation and the "safety" in recognition. We glimpse ourselves and rest
>assured in the knowledge that cliché is an odd kind of stability. Stasis in
>the factory of novelties.
I think there's something more to the instinctive idea of cognition than that, though it is often presented as the distortion you claim (why most theatre is boring: we mustn't surprise the audience). It is quite possible that what surprises and frightens in a new work is what is recognised in the self: people avoid disturbing art, say, because the disgust they feel is in part disgust at something within them that is attracted to it. I'm thinking of something like that great last scene in the play The Comedians, where the teacher confesses that he found the student's act _arousing_, just as he found entering Belsen _arousing_. Such recognitions aren't exactly comfortable or stabilising.
But art that really does that, rather than simply take the surfaces of shock or disgust, is quite difficult to achieve. I would say, because it has to be beautiful (I think Heiner Muller's work is beautiful, though he would vomit at the statement).
Just a short PS: why do the words "immortal soul" have to belong together? Why can't one have a mortal soul? (Psyche, after all, means soul: and soul can be a larger and more flexible word than mind or consciousness or self; even in the absence of god, people have spiritual longings and desires). Foucault's idea of the soul - a kind of scratched record - makes perfect sense to me, for example.
Best
Alison
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