Friday, September 11, 2009

Absence and Mystery

Turchi block quotes Gluck:

All earthly experience is partial. Not simply because it is subjective, but because that which we do not know, of the universe, of mortality, is so much more vast than that which we do know. What is unfinished or has been destroyed participates in these mysteries. The problem is to make a whole that does not forfeit this power.
This passage in the context of blank spaces on maps, of writers choosing some moments to deliver in a story over others, of poets maintaining a constant relationship with that blank space.

Is writing companion poems, or poems that, as I've heard from time to time, "speak to each other," one way of attempting to make something unified in the face of blank space that we all must negotiate on the page? I wonder, too, if information about a writer that is extracurricular to a poem fills in so much blank space for poets in this highly connected, avatar-loving internet virtuosity we've got going here. Does a book of poems attempt this negotiation better or in a different way from a poem found in a journal or online?

No comments:

Post a Comment