Friday, December 09, 2005

49

JH: I do the first few lines in my head, with an overall picture of the poem in my head, and the rest comes out in the writing. I do feel indolent when I don't write often - also a bit agitated. To be a poet and not write poems is like I'm already dead, with a body of work behind me and the inside of a coffin lid before me; I feel, for some reason, that my time, not as a poet but as a person, is running out. rtworks are offspring, but to me they're offspring I must feed from in order to create new offspring. Rather than the preceding sentences being an aesthetics, it's more of an example of the work ethic (American, Protestant, Modern, or any such variety), with marked characteristics of the literary. I've been wanting to read that Heidegger book, and your mention has edged me even closer to this goal. Anaphora is the term for the repetition of all, and I can't recall a term that could approximate your method of taking the last noun of a sentence and making it the first noun of the next. What are your thoughts on non-poets writing about poetry? Do they see more, or miss more? Does it all even out, somewhere in the Human?

AHB: Heidegger's thick but in slashes of whatsis one sees something original and strangely useful. he keeps talking about Rilke's valid poetry, which seems so totally, like random, and yet... note his nouns as verb, his willingness to speak of thingness. anyway... I'm with you on the work ethic, sense of guilt, whatever. that if you're going to say you're a writer, you had ought to be writing fairly regular like. as to your question, there are non-poets and there are non-poets. there's Harold Bloom, whose business is translating poetry into some heavy thing that is implanted in willing petrie dishes for the purpose of... self-replication? teaching the rules of literature. I can't say that he hasn't given me some insights but, aside from him being a crappy writer (good lord, what an oaf with the word! O Yale, ivy-covered dumpster, what's up with shitty academic writing???)), he seems to be creating from his own sputum a farcical dullness that lives on!!!. yoicks! but people read poetry who don't write it, tho not with the fever of Stephen King's membership. and from my own experience, non-poets can be quite sensitive in their reading, when no cowed by their ignorance or assumptions. which is to say, when people read with their attention, even if not 'trained' in poetry, they can give, well now, valid responses. what happens when non-poets confront your work?

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