oregonnerd: differing views

I’ve been very sick

August 22, 2015 at 2:27 am Leave a comment

as in memento mori sort of thing.  My pain is subsiding to the merely unbearable and I’m beginning to write “offline” [back to the short story become novel] again as well as feeling a poem or thirty coming.

About poetry.  That doesn’t mean that I haven’t actually written any number of poems recently.  I have a photographic memory with that complete exception.  The exception even goes so far as to without doubt recognize my own handwriting and being unable to remember ever having written a poem, although generally I think I do remember it.

The problem is that for me a poem is an event of consciousness which is then recorded in a sort of shorthand.  The short hand is not the event itself, or even a record of the event, but rather of the realization involved; it is a statement rather than a record.  It is a note, not a recapitulation or a portrait.  The attempt to preserve beauty is in respects incidental.

This means that in respects calling my poetry free verse or even for that matter poetry could be also called error.  However, no current language offers any equivalent mechanism for performing that function.  It’s also true that as far as I can tell it has rarely served said intended function–but then occasionally it has.  One cannot enlighten another, because one cannot look through another’s eyes and then present the vision to her or him.  The looking must be theirs, both effort and reward.

Entry filed under: lacking currency?, Pain. Tags: chronic pain, ehlers-danlos strikes again, poetry.