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STATEMENT FOR THE MODERN POETRY CONFERENCE AT CUNY
I suppose poetry is
Listening Out Loud
And what one listens to is language --
language in one's head
(only a fool would confuse that with himself thinking
only a fool would think the things that he hears languaging in him
are things that he himself is thinking)
Most poets are too smart to believe in their own intelligence.
Witless, clueless, we await a sign.
Pindar tells us a sign is never clear (at least a sign from Zeus) --
hence the poem veers towards a kind of
lucid incomprehensibility,
[Eventually
after a few hundred or thousand years we begin to comprehend the
incomprehensible -- Dante, Aeschylus, Milton -- and they become
classics and become of great celebrity but diminished use. But till
then the texts are of great power, startling, provoking, eliciting.
Some grand provokers -- Pindar himself, Li shang-yin, Lycophron,
Hoelderlin, Stein -- still wait their turn, still turn us towards the
poem we must write, the poem they force us to write, to make sense of
what they do to our heads.]
The incomprehensible provokes the reader to acts of preternatural awareness.
This
incomprehensibility factor is what the ancient Greeks called Mousa,
Muse. [The Spartans -- sturdy workmen, who would have liked the sacred
gizmos of Elshtain's gnoetry -- called her Moha.] (I told her I would
work her into this evening.)
The incomprehensible is the only thing that makes sense. That is, it creates sense -- the sense of something happening
to you as you read.
And that's the only happening poetry has?
The luster of listening.
Or what we hear in poetry is groans from the battlefield where time struggles against space.
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