11-19-2016, 06:42 AM
(11-19-2016, 05:47 AM)Leanne Wrote: I can't help reading this in the extreme metaphysical sense, sort of Donne-meets-Hesse with a knowing wink to Socrates. The body is mostly space, yet we privilege the not-space as if it is only real if we can sense it. Without space, everything would just clump together in an homogenous mass, no definition, no haecceity.
I have felt this a few times in my life; the most recent was when I visited the sculpture garden at Broken Hill. There you can walk among works of art created by incredible people out of the rock of the place itself, and feel inspired -- but then you stand at the edge of the hill and look out on desert for as far as you can see, until it joins with the sky. You realise that you are both miraculous in your existence and insignificant except as witness to a series of instants. With space comes perspective.
So, I won't do line-by-lines as you don't really require your poem to be broken into components. It is its quintessence. For me as a reader, it is about what is not there more than the words themselves.
Thank you Leanne. Space is like time; without it 'everything would just clump together' as you say. In art, including sculpture, I've always been fascinated by 'negative space' - the outside edges of things, and started wondering about 'positive space', whether everything has an 'inside edge' as well. Somehow it ties in with Michelangelo's response to a
question about how he 'saw' his work in a block of marble before he started carving. Something like ' I just take away all the pieces that don't belong'.
Maybe it's not a subject for poetry though.