Dead language, indeed.
A conversation I keep having--the basic premise and the speakers remain the same, though the circumstances and the time of day and the level of inebriation keep changing-- goes something like this:
Poetry is dead, you know.
Yes. That is true.
It's not even dying. It's dead.
Yes.
Does it need to be said again? Others have done so for a long time. W.H. Auden, a dead man in a flannel suit if ever there was one, said in his elegy to Yeats, "For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives/In the valley of its making...".
This is that valley. There's a hell of a lot of stone around here that needs moving. There's a hell of a lot of cracks in the mountains on either side, just begging to be packed with explosives. Do you think we can rip a big enough hole to walk through? Or will it be just enough to crawl, will we be able to stand up on the other side?
Once more unto the breach, dear friends?
I think that time might be coming. Meanwhile, I'll be here, peeling off the battered covers, looking between the lines, and rolling the scrolls up into fuses.
A conversation I keep having--the basic premise and the speakers remain the same, though the circumstances and the time of day and the level of inebriation keep changing-- goes something like this:
Poetry is dead, you know.
Yes. That is true.
It's not even dying. It's dead.
Yes.
Does it need to be said again? Others have done so for a long time. W.H. Auden, a dead man in a flannel suit if ever there was one, said in his elegy to Yeats, "For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives/In the valley of its making...".
This is that valley. There's a hell of a lot of stone around here that needs moving. There's a hell of a lot of cracks in the mountains on either side, just begging to be packed with explosives. Do you think we can rip a big enough hole to walk through? Or will it be just enough to crawl, will we be able to stand up on the other side?
Once more unto the breach, dear friends?
I think that time might be coming. Meanwhile, I'll be here, peeling off the battered covers, looking between the lines, and rolling the scrolls up into fuses.
No comments:
Post a Comment