Vita and I were talking about this earlier. Poetry shared a kinship with instrumental music, abstract art, experimental film and dance in evoking various responses without the necessities of formal storytelling in the representative arts such as lyrical music, figurative art, narrative film and musicals. If you try to read a poem the way you would a novel, you would fail.
I think of Archibald McLeish’s a poem should not mean, but be. It’s not a puzzle to be solved, or ‘translated’ or turned into something else that is not the poem, but an experience to be had. I think a good test of a poem that works for you like this is if you feel you want to return and experience it again, and again. Thanks.
Apologies for the incomplete intro going out. No idea what happened there. I wrote the thing a few days ago which perhaps is proof that being organised it bad and that us writers should stick with our instinct to only sit down to do our work at the last possible second.
I’ve had some problems writing and editing Substack posts on a mobile device. Whole passages can be deleted just by hitting return on the keyboard. Easy to not notice. This doesn’t happen on a laptop or desktop. Just thought I’d share.
Thank you for the recommendation. That's such a great website. It's rare to find a website that's more a garden than it is a website, a walled and secret garden of words planted both meticulously and chaotically to create a really pleasing aesthetic.
Vita and I were talking about this earlier. Poetry shared a kinship with instrumental music, abstract art, experimental film and dance in evoking various responses without the necessities of formal storytelling in the representative arts such as lyrical music, figurative art, narrative film and musicals. If you try to read a poem the way you would a novel, you would fail.
I think of Archibald McLeish’s a poem should not mean, but be. It’s not a puzzle to be solved, or ‘translated’ or turned into something else that is not the poem, but an experience to be had. I think a good test of a poem that works for you like this is if you feel you want to return and experience it again, and again. Thanks.
Apologies for the incomplete intro going out. No idea what happened there. I wrote the thing a few days ago which perhaps is proof that being organised it bad and that us writers should stick with our instinct to only sit down to do our work at the last possible second.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I’ve had some problems writing and editing Substack posts on a mobile device. Whole passages can be deleted just by hitting return on the keyboard. Easy to not notice. This doesn’t happen on a laptop or desktop. Just thought I’d share.
Billy Collins stated it well, in "Introduction to Poetry": https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46712/introduction-to-poetry
Thank you for the recommendation. That's such a great website. It's rare to find a website that's more a garden than it is a website, a walled and secret garden of words planted both meticulously and chaotically to create a really pleasing aesthetic.