From: zatavu-AT-excite.com
Date: Wed, 30 Aug 2000 15:44:26 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: Re: PLC: Poetry, prose, fiction as meaningful


>  I think you will find that "we" have not been discussing poetry
>  transcending. Rather such has been insubstantially, although repeatedly,
>  asserted. When one considers the problematics that the notion of
>  "transcendence" lands one in, one might see why.  Was it H.L Mencken who
>  defined the "soul" as religiously conceived (presumably a transcendent
>  concept) as a gaseous vertebrate?

Well, I think I have been guilty of this little piece of misunderstanding. I
should not have said poetry was "transcendent," implying transcendentalism.
I don't consider my poems transcendent in that way or in any way, since I am
such a materialist that I make Marx look like a transcendentalist by
comparison. What I meant, and should have said, is that poetry is by far
more idealistic than fiction. In each poem you find truth. WIthin that poem,
the truth it expounds is truth. In another poem, you will find some other
truth - sometimes even an opposite truth - and sometimes the same poet will
give opposite truths in two different poems - and be just as correct each
time. Fiction does not do that. At least, good fiction does not. WHile good
fiction does indeed owe a great deal to poetry, it is still a separate art
form. Very often we find that great poets make terrible fiction writers and
vice versa, though there are some notable exceptions. It is sort of like
assuming that photographers can paint because both deal with images (I know
that is a bit of a stretch). Both deal with similar things (images,
language), but the approaches to each is different, as are the concerns of
each art form. I personally am less concerned with the truth that is to be
found in poetry than I am in the existential questions that are to be found
in fiction - and in the novel in particular, whihc is why I rarely ever
write poems, but am constantly writing fiction. THis in part explains why
the romantics were far more interested in poetry while in the 20th Century,
the novel has instead taken precidence. WHere we once believed in the
attainability of truth, we now no longer believe in truth, but are left with
questions, which the novel in particular is most capable of investigating.
That, at least, is my opinion. I could be wrong.

Troy Camplin





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