Personal: Finding Angie Wheeler's Poem

[novak]

Back in and trying to settle down from traveling and visiting family over the Christmas holidays, and revving up to work on Chapter 2 of the dissertation. Just in from Starbucks where I was working on the main text from Sullivan for the chapter. Among other things while traveling, I tidied up a bunch of old computer files on my laptop and glanced

Comments

[friede]

Great googly moogly. She really liked antithesis, didn't she. But that's nothing compared to that repeating enjambment, which is a doozy. I'd only post that if I was sure it was no longer accurate -- or if I was a far more secure individual than I am.

I am reminded of a line in Sayers, relating to a sonnet composed collaboratively by the two protagonists. One writes the octave, unable to find the right sestet to solve the problem posed by the lines she writes. Later, she finds the poem has been completed by the other protagonist, whose sestet has found a solution she never thought of, but one that makes perfect sense both for the poem and for the characters. Thus...

"She went to bed thinking more of another person than herself. Which shows that even minor poetry has its uses."

[novak]

Today I learned the words "enjambment" and "sestet!" I think it's a pretty rare day now where I run into two words I don't know! :-)

As to this piece, I never really took the repeating enjambment as an attempt at an objective description or assessment, and so never really had to be secure in either looking at it, or in letting others see this piece. I always took it to be more having to do with her individual relation or orientation toward me, particularly in reading and critiquing one another's work and, to a lesser extent, at being the observer in our trio regarding my feelings at the time for the other Angie in our tight group-friendship.

The Sayers anecdote and line is priceless: thanks for sharing it!

[friede]

Apparently I can't ever stop teaching -- or so I am told.

It's interesting, isn't it, how differing perspectives can be brought to bear on a work. You then, you a few years later, you now, a third party now... pity reader-response criticism is so hard to do, because it's so fascinating!

Fifty years ago, we trained people to strip poems of all context and judge only on internal data -- I'm not sure that in practice anyone was ever really capable of separating themselves wholly from the lure of the voyeur.

I was talking about this with Tim earlier today in the middle of other related things, and he said, "Do you think that sometimes we read too much into words?" He's going to get whacked upside the head for that little heresy in about 24 hours...