Saturday, May 30, 2009

Magnetic Transmission - Criterion for Poetry


In one of the introductory statements to the book of collaborative poetry Ralentir Travaux, Paul Éluard writes: "The poet is one who inspires rather than one who is inspired."

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Maybe an important criterion, at least for a poet judging another poet's work, is inspiration. I don't really like the word "inspiration." It suggests overly romantic notions of muses & divine intervention. But whatever the term, in a very literal sense what's important to me when I'm reading a poet's work is whether or not it makes me want to write poetry. That's how I judge a poem. Does it give me a charge? Does it get inside my head & loosen up the stiff, mundane language blocks? Does it give me a rhythmic ultimatum? Does it hijack my "voice" so that reading becomes a kind of seance? I hope so, I hope so, I hope so, and I hope so. It's an entirely subjective, selfish manner of judging poetry. I don't pretend otherwise.

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Plato's magnet metaphor in Ion is similar, but for Plato this magnetic power originates in the divine. Speaking to the rhapsode, Socrates says:
...some divine power is moving you, such as there is in that stone which Euripides called the Magnesian… This magnet attracts iron rings, and not only that, but puts the same power into the iron rings, so that they can do the same as the stone does; they attract other rings, so that sometimes there is a whole long string of these rings hanging together, and all depend for their power on that one stone.
I don't know that we can find the "one" original stone that holds all the rings together. Maybe poets are a just a loose circle of rings without an origin.

2 comments:

Scott Sell said...

This reminds me of Wallace Steven's argument for an "elite" in the Nobel Rider essay....

Nate said...

what does Stevens say? I don't recall...