Saturday, October 21, 2006

The point of poetry

..."is to be acutely discomforting, to prod and provoke, to poke us in the eye, to punch us in the nose, to knock us off our feet, to take our breath away" says Paul Muldoon in this review of his latest book. I plan to memorize that. I like what he says about making little jokes, something which I've been playing with of late in my own work.

There's a post over at Eyewear responding to this review and to an article about Muldoon in The Economist which I haven't read. Swift's remarks about the concepts of lyric ego and poetic artifice have left me thinking.

I just got off the bike. I spent the last hour with the tension cranked, pedalling to the words of Tim Lilburn's Moosewood Sandhills, a book I've read many times. My heart is still pounding.

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