4.15.2004

Odd how musicality in poetry - from symbolism onward into the 20th century - became an avenue for increasing experiments in obscurity and private poetic language. Odd, that is, when you consider that music itself has so many characteristics of a "universal" language (of feeling and symbolic order).

What if poets applied musicality in the direction of intelligibility, communicative power? The power of feeling & shared experience. In the same way that ecologists idealize sharing one world. I recognize very clearly how these notions might seem threatening to the very essence of many poets' practice. The truth must be that every poet must find their own balance between sheer verbal exploration & originality, on the one hand, and clarity & intelligibility on the other. And the alignment of this balance will have a great deal to do with the larger or deeper motive or telos for the writing itself. Poets will often "sacrifice obscurity" - turn to very ordinary speech, even cliches - if the larger aesthetic purpose demands it.

(Sometimes I think all creative effort is merely an attempt to recover the powerful feelings and sensations of childhood.)

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