09-12-2016, 10:49 AM
(09-12-2016, 09:05 AM)RiverNotch Wrote: Also, a moment of insight: Sylvia Plath (yeah, Leanne, I love Plath -- but I really wish I had a copy of any of Ted Hughes' books, especially Tales from Ovid) once noted how she was jealous of the novelist, envying the fact that the novelist can take literally the entirety of a moment, the moment spanning up to a century, and the entirety precluding every single detail and every single action and every single word, and use it for her piece -- whereas, by corollary, the poet can only take "about a minute". But, if your mind isn't so limited to your earlier stated opinion that poetry is a self-indulgent exercise in cryptology (and really, a lot of the better translations of the epics read practically like novels -- or even skipping the translations like say The Ballad of the White Horse, or the Idylls of the King, which I in my perennial laziness have yet to read), then you're bound to have read at least one poem that shot through your heart in less than ten minutes ...Lower your expectations. There wasn't an inkling of interest in poetry that was within me when even up to this age (25), so there wasn't a poem that gave me an eye-/ear-gasm with all of its literary technicalities. My attitude here is this: like I said before (I think I did), the natural allure of poetry to a human mind still mystifies me. The singer-songwriter Julia Holter, who is a fantastic songwriter and producer, writes poetry for her songs. Nick Cave (of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds) is also a poet. In fact, I've heard "The Secret Life Of A Love Song" and "The Flesh Made Word" in their entirety, although he couldn't quite make it clear how he found God or any kind of meaning/purpose in poetry. I'm just trying to figure out what their deal is. Just think of me as an ignorant neophyte.
(09-12-2016, 09:05 AM)RiverNotch Wrote: ... unlike a novel, or a short story, which obviously have to be so long, or if they're not much longer than a poem, have to be so detailed, taking you through the logic of things rather than getting straight to the "aha!".Well, a poet's efforts to compress words and pack a punch, which is what metaphors seem to be, don't seem to get me straight to the 'aha!' unless I go to the Web and read an explanation of the poem on hand. Then you have to do research for some of the poems, which makes poetry feel like something to labor for rather than enjoy, which seems to be the poet's own undoing of what he was working for, thus failing to fulfill his objective: make an impact on the reader/reciter.