WS Merwin
Poetry is like making a joke. If you get one word wrong at the end of a joke, you’ve lost the whole thing.
Blotting paper
Aditi Machado blogs here
July 14th, 2009 § 3 comments
WS Merwin
Poetry is like making a joke. If you get one word wrong at the end of a joke, you’ve lost the whole thing.
I used to believe that. I used to spend months twiddling with words convinced there was a perfect arrangement of words for every poem but then I realised that the reader contributes so much to the final product that it really doesn’t matter if I write ‘wait a minute’ or hang on a second’ or ‘just a moment’ because they all suggest what I’m trying to suggest and that’s all a poem is, a suggestion that the reader takes up and runs with or fumbles and drops.
I often talk about poems as having punch lines though. I think the comparison works well.
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html?id=4676
I particularly liked this : “”These are some of the most unacademic poems I have ever read, in the sense that they could never be discussed in a university classroom, since they have no ‘meaning’ in any usual sense…. I think of what Samuel Beckett said about Finnegans Wake: we are too decadent to read this. That is, we are so used to a language that is flattened out and hollowed out, that is slavishly descriptive, that when we encounter a language as delicately modulated and as finely sensual as this, it is like trying to read Braille with boxing gloves on.”