File spoon-archives/phillitcrit.archive/phillitcrit_1997/phillitcrit.9711, message 397


Date: Sat, 08 Nov 1997 20:49:04 +0000
From: Irene Hossack Sime <irene.h-AT-virgin.net>
Subject: Re: PLC: After Irene Hossack


Stirling Newberry wrote:
> 
> At 2:49 PM +0100 11/7/97, Paul Mathias wrote:
> >A remark rang a bell -- in one of my heads...
> >
> >> I use A, B, and C as a means of seeking out what X's poetry can
> >> communicate.
> >
> >I see here a double understatement :
> >
> >- one is that A, B, or C, can be means by which one might try and dig
> >out the underlying sense of poetical works: as we use shovels to dig out
> >treasures, an author can be a shovel to another author.

The reading process or the experience of a poem is certainly like
finding hidden treasure, but I contend that the treasure finds the
reader not the other way around as you suggest. Reading a poem is also
the experience of being read by the poem. I have yet to find criticism
which tells us literary history and influences on a poem satisfactory or
helpful. Hill's connection with Celan in the poems I mentioned in my
earlier post are explicit, Hill wants us to see the connection. My
belief is that to read Celan's poems in order to read Hill's is
unneccesary. One can certainly look for a relation in themes and
consider why Hill chooses to use Celan in this way, but the experience
of the poem comes through reading the poem created by Hill. We can
express the pleasure we experience in the presence of beautiful art or
architecture without knowing its place in art history, the influences
upon the artist which helped him create the work, why not with poetry?
As Schlegel said, 'Notes to a poem are like anatomical lectures on a
piece of roast beef.'     

> Two short thoughts:
> 
> The writer admitted that the Hill both had exact meaning that he wanted to
> convey, and that he had deliberately avoided making that meaning easily
> appearant. While I certainly agree that such meaning is not the whole of
> the value, it must count for something.

A poet writes what must be written. What I meant in my earlier post is
that Hill doesn't change his poetry and the words he uses in order to
make his poems easier to understand (as many of his critics suggest,
accusing him of writing in a deliberately obscure way). I think most
poets would agree that it is impossible to start out in the creation of
a poem determined to be either easily understood or obscure. Poetry
happens. Hill knows the slippery nature of language and is aware of the
way in which words can convey a multitude of meanings, this contributes
to the richness of his work rather than being a hinderance to
understanding. Meaning is made through the inter-relation between the
poem, the poet and the reader. This is not a static event but one which
is irrepeatable and originary, every time the poem is read.
> 
> Secondly, if one wishes to see the country, one asks a native where to go.
> A guide can help one with the "experience" as much as the "meaning". Or at
> least so Mortimer Adler contends...
> 
I think a guide through the navigation of a poem can be helpful. It can
also be a process which can exclude and lock out the many possibilities
for meaning a poem has. The meaning of a poem can be shared, but the
experience of a poem is an individual and solitary one which each of us
must navigate through ourselves. Maurice Blanchot writes of the
experience of poetry and the best readings of poems often come from this
place--writing of the experience rather than the meaning.

Irene


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