Thursday, July 30, 2020

something made

I haven't really liked many poems...Ars Poetica by Archibald MacLeish, In the Waiting Room by Elizabeth Bishop. 

I suppose I liked Emily Brontё's poetry because I like Emily Brontё. 

I enjoy reading ideas about poetry - like, Harold Bloom's work, for instance, but as soon as he actually quotes excerpts of poetry, I'm lost. I get what he's saying in his prose about poetry, but as soon as he illustrates what he's expressing with an actual poem.....no

anyway, what he writes about poetry applies to all literature, and he applies it to all literature. Bloom says that ultimately literary criticism becomes poetry and vice versa (because all poems are about other poems) and I can see that in his work. 

Bakhtin's literary criticism also has a distinctly poetic quality about it. and he wrote a book called, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, so he obviously sees Dostoevsky's novels as being poetic. 

in exploring this rarefied field involving poetics and prose on Amazon, I end up finding books about narrative theory and then they lead me to a book that I own: The Anatomy of Story (2007) by John Truby, which is....is it a practical book? In a way it is - it's about how to compose a story - more specifically, how to write a screen-play - but it's full of ideas, references to literature, films, myths, poetry ....it's a very deep book and at the same time an eminently practical one. 

Truby quotes from Gaston Bachelard's, The Poetics of Space
Two kinds of space, intimate space and exterior space, keep encouraging each other....in their growth. 
 

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