1) The difficulty is not in arranging or dis-arranging language--its assembly or disassembly. Nor is it in the seriousness, playfulness, strangeness with which it's employed/deployed. The difficulty is in doing any, or all, of these things in such a way that you actually feel something as a result. And even more difficult than that is getting a reader to feel something...
2) In poetry, building a structure (with the toy blocks of language) isn't enough. The structure has to have a light on, and there has to be somebody home.
3) "There's a girl who lives on Heaven Hill..."
4) The crux of the matter is the body in the box.
1 comment:
I like this as notes on poetry. Especially the notion of the poem's own author "feeling something as a result" of the arrangement of language. As an ignoramus off the street, I would expect the poet to have the feeling first, and arrange the words as a result. Regardless of the fact that whenever I have written a poem (approximately once) it was precisely as you describe in your notes.
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