Friday, February 8, 2013

On music, myth, and shapely speech

One of the offices of poetry: to use shapely speech to express the radicals of existence in all their ambiguity.

To answer idiosyncratically, privately, to a public world given over to falsehood, fake facts, scuzzy rumor, casual murderousness, comedic denials, manic impromptu wind-tunnel ideologies.

To answer palsied language with vital language, plasticity, gaiety of invention and fabulation, against 
opportunistic mendacity.

If poetry can’t, or chooses not to, reveal what it feels like to live as a sentient being in a perilous enchanted world, then maybe it can (and deserves to) die. Or that mission will be replaced by a spectacular dumb show loaded with content, whipped up drama, and “language.”

It will be a polymer mold of  what once was primary material. What can replace the completeness and 
immediacy of feeling that the sounds of words whip up or lay down?

Mickey Rourke and the Bluebird of Happiness: A Notebook
On music, myth, and shapely speech.
W. S. Di Piero

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/article/245274

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