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Oct. 21st, 2011 06:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
proximoceptionWhat to call the kind of poem I mean? Set-pieces? Dioramas with mechanical elements? They aren't quite allegories, or anyway are a very special kind. Not quite scenes, but not quite tableaus. Quest portions? Decisions don't quite happen, battles definitely aren't won, usually aren't even reached. The knight on his horse coming upon something revising all expectation. But the something can be really something, a lot of somethings, a whole toy train landscape of related somethings. The poet tends to have each represent another poem, or the sort of surprise about life that could deserve being a poem. The more they can get in the more this vision approaches totality, the more some modeled or implied sequence of conclusions will get a reality, a life where these are the salient details right. Because of course there's usually a pretty free intermixture of observing and thinking about what's being observed - the reader's not left to do the whole unpacking. And it's not all packed in - the thought element allows ambiguity, perhaps, while the embodied, or I guess ensceneried aspects are the more rigid ones. They're the facts you won't escape or have to escape by interpreting, thus productive or unproductive of those mind-flights.
And these do tend to be set-pieces among the poet's other poems - tend to be longer, pentametric'ler. Obviously I mean Abrams' greater odes, redubbed 'crisis lyrics' by Bloom, though it takes some doing to find the crisis in "At the Fish-houses" or "Mont Blanc." I'm not entirely convinced you even need a crisis, but it's inevitable, given how densely the poet's collapsing other poems into this one, that these will be pieces they put particular stake in, that the answers given or refused here will be crucial ones. You might be able to write one when not at crisis, but you'll probably derive at least dramatic benefit from presenting things critically. All of you versus all of it, at its strongest, then take apart the versus, the it, the you as applicable - because again, no fight. And how could you anyway? Apocalypse can be gestured at, in poems like these, but it can't actually happen. Or if it does that's another poem, the Alastor genre, where the impossibility of ending gets addressed somehow, usually impossibly.
Real Americans get to use animals. New Yorkers, Bostonians and Brits are stuck with birds or inanimate nature, or worse, people - always a wild card, though Wordsworth was good with these. Animals were a technological advance for the genre, I think - but then I would.
And these do tend to be set-pieces among the poet's other poems - tend to be longer, pentametric'ler. Obviously I mean Abrams' greater odes, redubbed 'crisis lyrics' by Bloom, though it takes some doing to find the crisis in "At the Fish-houses" or "Mont Blanc." I'm not entirely convinced you even need a crisis, but it's inevitable, given how densely the poet's collapsing other poems into this one, that these will be pieces they put particular stake in, that the answers given or refused here will be crucial ones. You might be able to write one when not at crisis, but you'll probably derive at least dramatic benefit from presenting things critically. All of you versus all of it, at its strongest, then take apart the versus, the it, the you as applicable - because again, no fight. And how could you anyway? Apocalypse can be gestured at, in poems like these, but it can't actually happen. Or if it does that's another poem, the Alastor genre, where the impossibility of ending gets addressed somehow, usually impossibly.
Real Americans get to use animals. New Yorkers, Bostonians and Brits are stuck with birds or inanimate nature, or worse, people - always a wild card, though Wordsworth was good with these. Animals were a technological advance for the genre, I think - but then I would.
