HG Poetics [US]:
What has struck me is that, while good storytelling does encourage us to lose ourselves in the story & forget time, nevertheless fiction tends to make time a theme of the story, so that the experience of reading it is double-edged : we lose ourselves (& time) in stories which describe the effects of time's power. The Odyssey and In Search of Lost Time are, I guess, the prime examples.
Poetry, on the other hand, does not simply intensify our experience of time : poetry changes the basic character of that experience. Prose may demolish our awareness of time; poetry seems to demolish time's very objectivity (as sequential, historical, impersonal phenomenon). Poetic time is a kind of performed Now, in which language spirals back reflexively on itself - and in the process, reshapes perception, knowledge, the sense of self and others.
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This entry was posted by eeksypeeksy
on Tuesday, January 17, 2006 at 8:17 PM.
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