poetry, "success," and the necessity of audiences
There is a fine balance between acknowledging that poetry is successful when it translates to the reader the images, emotions, and ideas that the artist intended and allowing the audience to overdetermine the work. This is one of my struggles, currently. One could call it workshop syndrome, I guess.
Idealistically, I would like to be able to disqualify the audience as they relate to the “success” of a work, but a poem cannot happen without a reader. Without readers, they are just all the leaves piling upon one another, building soil. Building soil? Well, yes perhaps, but out of what?
There is an instinct in me that acknowledges that all poems share some similarity in the event that they are. Similarities of events demand similarity of material; The world? The individual experience in the world? No, too much thinking has ruined those options for us. :) But perhaps the ways that language is able to articulate the world (even though ever-expanding) is expansive within boundaries. The medium defines, partially, the form of the work, and the way that it gathers itself is inherently particular to that medium; just as carbon can only bond in ways particular to it. But if you want to mention Heidegger's notion of Ort, then from what repository is all of this (poetry) gathered?
I think that I would like to claim that language is nearly a being, itself; that language not only determines what of our experience we can translate into it and therefore that it defines us, as well, but that it, through our employment of it, defines itself continuously, and processively. Like a soil builds itself from the leaves and the trees that were once soil.
I keep remembering the library where I went got my undergraduate degree: the low, squat building whose floors overlapped to house the million books. The halogens buzzing all day, all night, like some large animal breathing quietly in its sleep, and no one reading anything. But the rows of books, the lives in the words of those soundless books, had a presence, as though they arranged themselves in a corona of language, hovering.
The language was there, prescient, even without readers.
Idealistically, I would like to be able to disqualify the audience as they relate to the “success” of a work, but a poem cannot happen without a reader. Without readers, they are just all the leaves piling upon one another, building soil. Building soil? Well, yes perhaps, but out of what?
There is an instinct in me that acknowledges that all poems share some similarity in the event that they are. Similarities of events demand similarity of material; The world? The individual experience in the world? No, too much thinking has ruined those options for us. :) But perhaps the ways that language is able to articulate the world (even though ever-expanding) is expansive within boundaries. The medium defines, partially, the form of the work, and the way that it gathers itself is inherently particular to that medium; just as carbon can only bond in ways particular to it. But if you want to mention Heidegger's notion of Ort, then from what repository is all of this (poetry) gathered?
I think that I would like to claim that language is nearly a being, itself; that language not only determines what of our experience we can translate into it and therefore that it defines us, as well, but that it, through our employment of it, defines itself continuously, and processively. Like a soil builds itself from the leaves and the trees that were once soil.
I keep remembering the library where I went got my undergraduate degree: the low, squat building whose floors overlapped to house the million books. The halogens buzzing all day, all night, like some large animal breathing quietly in its sleep, and no one reading anything. But the rows of books, the lives in the words of those soundless books, had a presence, as though they arranged themselves in a corona of language, hovering.
The language was there, prescient, even without readers.
posted by a. frost at 12:56 PM
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