Tom
this is interesting:
>
>I think it's fascinating that the more Is in a poem the more likely the poet
>is to kill themself regardless of whether they write about trauma and
>sadness or flowers.
but I suspect alison would agree wiht me whn I ask, what kind of 'I' is he
talking about. Having finally found time for the pleasure of reading
Alison's Attempts at Being (SALT 2002: try to track it down, folks), it's a
good example of how many different 'Is' even poetry (& a kind of drama) can
present, from poem to poem.
On the other hand, I note that I have been trying for years to evade the I
in attempts at what I call anti-lyric. Then wrote a sequence that's all I,
except the I is created from the phrases found in the letters of Keats, so
it ain't me.
How one gets there, then, is part of the comples at work. I suspect the
kind of poetry Pennebaker is dealing with is 'confessional'? So the huge
new Collected by Lowell, eg, would be an example, & even more the work of
Berryman, etc?
Doug
Douglas Barbour
Department of English
University of Alberta
Edmonton Alberta Canada T6G 2E5
(h) [780] 436 3320 (b) [780] 492 0521
http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/dbhome.htm
I do not limit myself: I imitate
many fancy things such as the dull red
cloth of literature, its mumbled griefs
Lisa Robertson
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