Poetry is always a bigger tent than anyone imagines. I went to a poetry gathering at our church the other night. One lady, after telling a somewhat contemptuous but partly inspiring story about an oral performance of the Odyssey she'd seen, proceeded to read her favorite sections from Spoon River Anthology as quickly as if she were skimming a newspaper story. She seemed completely deaf to the weight and pacing of words. Yet she'd come there to share her favorite poems. The author Mary likes so much on Mary Sidney brings impressive, exhaustive erudition to bear on the authorship question without a word on the characteristic handling of language in the many, many facets that make up the writer's complex and inimitable fingerprint. Poets don't own poetry, and it is a little shocking to see how much it can mean to people who see it from such a different perspective. To some extent the poet's perspective can be demonstrated, laboriously, but to some extent it's untransmittable intuition.
PS. Hi Ann. I was at a funeral the other day. We were singing a very nice hymn, so I looked down at the bottom of the page to see who wrote it. Your pal, Jan Struther!
Last edited by Bill Carpenter; 05-09-2014 at 06:33 AM.
|