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Yes, to formulating the comparision between 'lyric' and 'narrative' rather than 'poetry' and 'prose.' Prose invokes, not poetry, not for a very long time, but verse as its mediating other. But then... what about narrative poetry? (though there's not much of that being written in recent years)
There are so many poetries now, and no Pope or College of Cardinals to distinguish true dogma from heresy. If one can't settle on what poetry is, how are we to agree on what it is not?
Outside of establishment realist conventions, much the same can be said from the side of narrative.
The distinctions you've made in this post make sense to me, precisely because they are practical reflections--what I think of as the aesthetics of process--and not an attempt at formulating theoretical definitions.
I think, if I may generalize from my own experience, that aesthetic questions best serve the writer or poet when they remain problems--ill defined and impossible to get hold of in any precise philosophically consistent form, problems not of constructing abstract theory, but problems which demand solutions in the work itself as it progresses. If one knows what a poem is when one sits down to write (or a novel, story, painting, musical work... ), what is the point of writing it? The writing is what one does to work out, not a solution to the problem, but a statement of its conditions--very much what you seem to be describing here.
Jacob Russell |
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11.01.09 - 10:11 am | #
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