Hola,
I am new but pehaps overly-eager to the blog world, as I just started a LiveJournal last night (God help us all). I'll keep the biographical stuff brief, as I doubt my biography's very interesting. Suffice it to say I have one of those very useless BA things (from UCSC- slugs dominate, slowly!) in a very useless subject (philosophy) and have decided to add an MFA on to it for reasons which are becoming increasingly unclear. I just reread my application to Mills and here's what I seemed to think at the time: "My interest is in multimedia performance involving poetry and music". Whatever the hell that means. At the time I was debating between applying to the music or the poetry department, but I seemed to be writing more poetry than music, and both outputs were equally bad, so I figured why not pretend to be a poet instead of a musician for two years. In reality I'm a stone mason and a carpenter, though if someone wants to pay me to write or play music instead, I'll gladly never pick a up a hammer again.
This is all very (un)witty, however, I do have some serious interest in poetry, in the form of a set of questions. The first being: is reading an experience, in the same sense that, say, waterskiing is an experience? I know that sounds dumb, but think about it: If you read a poem about, say waterskiing, and it engenders some sensation, chills perhaps, are you having an experience in the same sense as a waterskiier? I don't mean the experience of waterskiing, I don't think anyone would maintain that, but just an experience at all. If so, what is the relationship between the two "experiences"? I feel as though I'm tredding on the breaking point of the word "experience" here, as though Wittgenstein were going to storm into my room and shout at me to stop writing nonsense. But it's salient to me because I'm interested in what I call phenomonological poetry, which is just a silly way of saying poetry which seeks to convey visceral experience, which is probably most poetry. These days, I tend to think that it is not as analogues of experience that words create sensations in readers, but more directly through some property of their own, though I still want to maintain a very straightforward empiricist theory of meaning, that words ostend to concrete things which can be experienced in reality. If I make any headway on this I'll post again (right after I find a cure for the common cold) or you can check out my LJ (shameless plug) where I'll be working on this and other questions in an ongoing-in-circles kind of way.
I suppose I ought to put up an example of what I'm talking about. Here's some Philip Levine (who looks corny excerpted, or maybe just is corny, but I like him dammit) from the poem Joe Gould's Pen:
his pen tried to find him in
9,250,000
words and failed because it had
no word for what rises in
your esaphagus when night
starts over at 4 a.m.
Actually, rereading it, I'm not sure that's a good case for my argument, as I take it the reason I fell in love with that line is I've had, or believe I've had, just that experience. It's interesting to me how he can only point to it though, and not name it. The whole idea of naming, especially as an explanation of meaning, has always troubled me. But to stop digressing, I read the passage as saying, for some of the important bits of our lives, there is no language whatsoever. Yet to talk about these bits is very subversive in a way, because it challenges the commonplace notion that what we talk about, and only what we talk about, is reality. I tend to think most of the action is happening well below the level of speech, and maybe only poetry can capture it. I guess that's the next question: why is poetry able to do what other linguistic modes can't? Is it just because we read it, or listen to it, differently? Maybe someone can help me with that one.
I'd post something of my own here, but I haven't written anything readable in a bit, and I figure as this is an ongoing, workshop kind of thing, it would be a bit lame to post old stuff. You'll all be suffering through enough of my scribblings in workshop anyways, so I'll shut up now.
I am new but pehaps overly-eager to the blog world, as I just started a LiveJournal last night (God help us all). I'll keep the biographical stuff brief, as I doubt my biography's very interesting. Suffice it to say I have one of those very useless BA things (from UCSC- slugs dominate, slowly!) in a very useless subject (philosophy) and have decided to add an MFA on to it for reasons which are becoming increasingly unclear. I just reread my application to Mills and here's what I seemed to think at the time: "My interest is in multimedia performance involving poetry and music". Whatever the hell that means. At the time I was debating between applying to the music or the poetry department, but I seemed to be writing more poetry than music, and both outputs were equally bad, so I figured why not pretend to be a poet instead of a musician for two years. In reality I'm a stone mason and a carpenter, though if someone wants to pay me to write or play music instead, I'll gladly never pick a up a hammer again.
This is all very (un)witty, however, I do have some serious interest in poetry, in the form of a set of questions. The first being: is reading an experience, in the same sense that, say, waterskiing is an experience? I know that sounds dumb, but think about it: If you read a poem about, say waterskiing, and it engenders some sensation, chills perhaps, are you having an experience in the same sense as a waterskiier? I don't mean the experience of waterskiing, I don't think anyone would maintain that, but just an experience at all. If so, what is the relationship between the two "experiences"? I feel as though I'm tredding on the breaking point of the word "experience" here, as though Wittgenstein were going to storm into my room and shout at me to stop writing nonsense. But it's salient to me because I'm interested in what I call phenomonological poetry, which is just a silly way of saying poetry which seeks to convey visceral experience, which is probably most poetry. These days, I tend to think that it is not as analogues of experience that words create sensations in readers, but more directly through some property of their own, though I still want to maintain a very straightforward empiricist theory of meaning, that words ostend to concrete things which can be experienced in reality. If I make any headway on this I'll post again (right after I find a cure for the common cold) or you can check out my LJ (shameless plug) where I'll be working on this and other questions in an ongoing-in-circles kind of way.
I suppose I ought to put up an example of what I'm talking about. Here's some Philip Levine (who looks corny excerpted, or maybe just is corny, but I like him dammit) from the poem Joe Gould's Pen:
his pen tried to find him in
9,250,000
words and failed because it had
no word for what rises in
your esaphagus when night
starts over at 4 a.m.
Actually, rereading it, I'm not sure that's a good case for my argument, as I take it the reason I fell in love with that line is I've had, or believe I've had, just that experience. It's interesting to me how he can only point to it though, and not name it. The whole idea of naming, especially as an explanation of meaning, has always troubled me. But to stop digressing, I read the passage as saying, for some of the important bits of our lives, there is no language whatsoever. Yet to talk about these bits is very subversive in a way, because it challenges the commonplace notion that what we talk about, and only what we talk about, is reality. I tend to think most of the action is happening well below the level of speech, and maybe only poetry can capture it. I guess that's the next question: why is poetry able to do what other linguistic modes can't? Is it just because we read it, or listen to it, differently? Maybe someone can help me with that one.
I'd post something of my own here, but I haven't written anything readable in a bit, and I figure as this is an ongoing, workshop kind of thing, it would be a bit lame to post old stuff. You'll all be suffering through enough of my scribblings in workshop anyways, so I'll shut up now.
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