Monday 15 November 2021

Michael Lee Rattigan : part three

Has your consideration of poetry changed since you began?

My understanding of what it can do, as opposed to other forms of verbal attack, certainly has. Poetry isn’t merely prose with aspirations, but a foray on the ineffable, a leap in the Kierkegaardian sense of not resting on the pre-determined or pre-determinable. It isn’t just born, in Yeats’ phrase, from “the shock of new material”, but from the propulsive shock of entanglement. There is an imaginative collapsing that inevitably takes place, from Blake’s well-known “world in a grain of sand” to Will Alexander’s “galvanic shock of the cosmos”. Interesting that I’ve used the same word – in considering poetry – three times here, telling. I’m also aware that my “consideration of poetry” simultaneously is and isn’t everything that it is capable of being up to this point.    

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