Friday, January 05, 2007
From The: "I Wish That I Had Said That" - File
"When we read texts in poetry workshops, we tend to read singularly and reductively, toward a revision of the poem that yields the story that all can follow. Toward a narrative, a certain coherence. But when we talk of the poems we love, the ones we return to, we often speak as one haunted.
If we, in poetry workshops, when reading poems, look for ways to reveal the fragments of the poem, and to let the breakages speak, we might find our poems becoming larger. So rather than asking a poem to yield itself to our ideas of the necessary surface unity, we open our thoughts to looking for a deep unity behind fragments, our questions and our enjoyment might possibly be enriched. "
-------------------------------------------------John Gallaher
Check out the rest of his post entitled: The Poetry Workshop: a Question
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2 comments:
That's an interesting take. I think the problem I have with it is that "fragmentation" is somewhat of a period style/trend right now (also called elliptical poem), and so do we really trust that the fragment does more, or is it simply a popular method at this time? I pose the question, I don't know the answer.
That's not what I understood when I read John Gallaher's post, but I may have misconstrued his point. I do, however, see where you're coming from. The fragment may "work" on its own but it must inevitably further the rhetoric - i.e. act like a spoke in support of the poetic wheel.
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