Tuesday, 19 April 2022

David Epstein : part four

What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?  

Poetry provides a reflective and reflexive awareness of a state of consciousness; preservation of persons (cf. Allen Grossman, The Sighted Singer); Think of it this way, as a kind of generalization: We’re not good at relating conceptual-level apprehensions.  We need poets to expand our vocabulary-driven and -limited thoughts. In this way, poets are the geographic explorers of the realms of human experience.  We need poets to go there and report on it: the coasts, the forests, the other beings and states of being.  I’m not a googly ghost-whisperer at all; I’m a very science-based person enthralled with things like space telescopes and subatomic particles.  But people experience the world largely through their narratives and their vocabularies, so that’s where poetry is a vanguard.  

No comments:

Post a Comment