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Dec. 10th, 2010 06:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
proximoceptionWhat does interest me about those poems?
Centrality, I think is part of it: they really are ways to sum up the poet's statement about what they're doing, what world they confront, what results they hope or dread. Hence about what and where we are, what we do or should so, what will happen to us. Lyric (ambitious lyric) tends to reduce life to a moment - or a moment then its analysis, then a moment created by that analysis. Lyrics approach narrative without quite hitting it, and often borrow narrative elements but with a more concentrated, gestural purpose. The stage is set and then reacted to (then the reaction reacted to), like a tableau, so if there's a character other than the narrator or her stand-in they will represent something. Probably they will represent everything.
To vary the Love and Sleep kids' game: close your eyes, name a general place that you're walking through, name the specific place that you reach, name the entity you meet there. That is your life until now, your present moment, the truth you have reached but do not understand. Now write an essay about it.
Who would God be if we didn't presume to know him? Something irrelevant, if not seeable through the world - but if we took the world as our message from/about him? It makes life itself an encounter. Which it isn't, but treating it like that can be helpful for lyric, can force a summary assessment of the entirety of one's circumstances. Distill what life is like, for a reader to say aye too, so long as you get the feel of that feel just right. And presumably God himself is religion's ancient robbery from lyric. Lyric as conversation with our life. Or the record of the failure to have one.
(You: I have so many questions and complaints! It: [world noise]. You: Well, at least [insert consolation/insight won from listening to world noise].)
And of course all that is useless without the results. This form is itself the challenge of the giant.
Centrality, I think is part of it: they really are ways to sum up the poet's statement about what they're doing, what world they confront, what results they hope or dread. Hence about what and where we are, what we do or should so, what will happen to us. Lyric (ambitious lyric) tends to reduce life to a moment - or a moment then its analysis, then a moment created by that analysis. Lyrics approach narrative without quite hitting it, and often borrow narrative elements but with a more concentrated, gestural purpose. The stage is set and then reacted to (then the reaction reacted to), like a tableau, so if there's a character other than the narrator or her stand-in they will represent something. Probably they will represent everything.
To vary the Love and Sleep kids' game: close your eyes, name a general place that you're walking through, name the specific place that you reach, name the entity you meet there. That is your life until now, your present moment, the truth you have reached but do not understand. Now write an essay about it.
Who would God be if we didn't presume to know him? Something irrelevant, if not seeable through the world - but if we took the world as our message from/about him? It makes life itself an encounter. Which it isn't, but treating it like that can be helpful for lyric, can force a summary assessment of the entirety of one's circumstances. Distill what life is like, for a reader to say aye too, so long as you get the feel of that feel just right. And presumably God himself is religion's ancient robbery from lyric. Lyric as conversation with our life. Or the record of the failure to have one.
(You: I have so many questions and complaints! It: [world noise]. You: Well, at least [insert consolation/insight won from listening to world noise].)
And of course all that is useless without the results. This form is itself the challenge of the giant.
