[Curtis Gale Weeks]

In the end, can we be wholly new? - isn't everything a recapitulation of something else - books speak of books - but it might appear to be a fresh take on an issue.

I have always maintained that language itself is borrowed, handed down from generation to generation, and although we might create "new words," we are still using the same old consonants and vowels...When I think of "new," I think of new arrangements. I.e., the parts are old, but the thing as a whole has never existed before.

Back to Tim's question: bear_music's poem inspired me to reconsider "voice," or maybe a better word would be "personality" or "character" as one alternative to a definitive meaning for a poem. I won't go so far as to say that Shakespeare "invented" the human a la Bloom, but the way I experienced "My Secret Kept Alive" is similar to the way I would experience most of the characters in Shakespeare's plays: They don't appear to be completely self-aware. They talk their talk, but my impression of them is different than their apparent impression of themselves. This presentation of a "character" is different than the way Shakespeare's sonnets work. In his sonnets, he's presented a voice which seems very much self-aware, a voice which knows exactly what it is saying and how an audience will hear it. Consequently, we have an easier time of defining the meaning intended in the sonnets: the speaker is telling us that meaning directly. In the plays, however, we are often presented with a humorous or pitiable--generally, a partial--character, and there's no definitive meaning. Presumably, the disparity between how that character sees himself and how we see the character is the meaning: something created in this interplay of perspectives, or this mixing of subjective/objective perspectives. This might be a way of presenting meaning through a kind of circumlocution, or by plotting two different perspectives which circle the same speech of the character. I experienced bear_music's poem similarly.

Curtis.