Sunday, December 26, 2004
(9:04 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Poetry
I wish I could write poetry -- just enjoy the shape and weight of the words. All literature enjoys a certain freedom of speech, a certain tolerated reticence with regard to meaning and teleology, but somehow, one can never attain the same freedom in prose as one can with a text broken up into lines and stanzas -- as though that's the visual cue for a truly useless piece of text, a text where nothing at all is at stake.I've said before that I don't want to be taken literally -- even in those pieces where I incorporate my life events, I'm not trying to do autobiography or memoir, just cobbling together the materials that are ready to hand. Yet I keep getting all these responses: comments, e-mails, personal conversations. Perhaps next time I should add more line breaks? Or perhaps my respondants are attempting to write their own literature, their own poems, and I shouldn't take their responses so personally.
