Riddles, enigmas : an answer in the form of a question.

Reading : Poetry, word-play and word-war in Wallace Stevens, by Eleanor Cook. "Poetry is the scholar's art," he sd. Some of the semantic/rhetorical complexity she uncovers is astonishing, daunting.

Riddles, proverbs, charms. Poetry, in part, a burning-off, a paring-down, an escape from casual speech, cliches. "the firecat bristles in the way".

(Whereas po-biz acts like a miniscule sub-category of sho-biz.)

btw, interesting articles on Mayan glyphs in Times science section today.

An Old English riddle (#8), from the Exeter Book, trans. by Kevin Crossley-Holland (Penguin Bks, 1978):

I've one mouth but many voices;
I dissemble and often change my tune,
I declaim my deathless melodies,
I don't desist from my refrain.
Aged evening-songster, I entertain
men in their homes by rehearsing
my whole repertoire; they sit, bowed down,
quiet in their houses.  Guess my name,
I who mimic the jester's japes
as loudly as I can, and rejoice men
with choicest songs in various voices.

I'll give you three guesses.

also reading Anglo-Saxon riddles from the Exeter Book (translated). I'm in "start over" mode.

random gurglings re "poetry, theories of":

It's like other semiotic systems (both art & non-art), ie., it organizes experience, reality as we know it, into "meaning-packets". We make gestures, signs at things, put them into relations with other things. A natural, practical (survival) activity.

So this is mimetic.

But it is also autotelic, in the sense of playful and beautiful-in-itself. In this sense it has no exoteric function, it's simultaneously creative & self-fulfilled, a miniature pleroma. In this way it's "objective" (in the sense noted in previous post).

But here I would add that, if so, it is, paradoxically, also mimetic or realist (if, and perhaps only if, the cosmos as a whole is also, in some fashion, a creation). So the autotelic possibly fuses or harmonizes with the mimetic.

& then it is expressive in the sense that words are not merely semiotic, but affective as well : they stimulate emotions and memory. & emotions and memory, in turn, create intellectual ripples and waves: desire motivates plot, desire spurs exploration.

& then of course it is pragmatic in the Horatian sense, in that everyone longs for both intellectual clarity - the semiotic syntheses of experience - and affective, emotional pathos - the felt expression of the feelings (which cannot easily be distinguished from perceptions). And since everyone longs for these things, we have a captive audience which includes the human race, as well as bluejays and other such mimics.