>> To clarify, consider a similar
>> question: what is Bach's Concerto for Solo Cello #6? If
>> someone asked you to produce it, would you point to its printed score?
>>
> Sure. Bach did when HE asked a cellist to produce it.
>
> I agree about the oral dimension of poetry, Jon, but the relationship
> between performance and pen is (I'm sure you'd agree) fascinatingly
> interpenetrative.
>
> P
Agreed, Peter - need we not point to the Chinese, going way back - ink and
brush.
Creeley (where?) had interesting, helpful things to say about the different
kinds of poems that could vary with implement and medium. The character of
resistance between say graphite and rag paper, and between keyboard and
monitor screen, can produce different kinds of work. He was very interested
in these levels of materiality - one that I think made for his
correspondences and work with visual artists, and other mediums where the
physical resistances are there by definition.
When writers first started using word-processors - circa 198x - (as
computers were then called), I recall an agent saying that the book
proposals became twice as long with no difference in the quality of the
books offered.
Just think how many trees (forests) Ann Rice could have saved if she wrote
with a manual typewriter. The computer, ironically, turned her books into a
genuine tree Vamp.
Stephen V
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