What if we dislike or despise or hate poems because they are – every 
single one of them – failures? The poet and critic Allen Grossman tells a
 story (there are many versions of the story) that goes like this: 
you’re moved to write a poem because of some transcendent impulse to get
 beyond the human, the historical, the finite. But as soon as you move 
from that impulse to the actual poem, the song of the infinite is 
compromised by the finitude of its terms. So the poem is always a record
 of failure.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n12/ben-lerner/diary
No comments:
Post a Comment