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[pachamama]

A poem with one line wrong is like a Rubik's Cube with one square wrong: what it precisely is not is one move away from completion.

-- Don Paterson, The Blind Eye, Faber and Faber, 2007

Comments

[somerled]

I really like that quote! Of course it isn't literally possible for a Rubik's Cube to be wrong in just one square, it would have to be wrong in at least two, but it would take a lot of effort to fix the claim and retain the impact, which only goes to support its thesis anyway.

[pachamama]

one square wrong in each face is possible.

[somerled]

A three word edit. I guess it's not so hard to fix poetry or aphorisms when pachamama does it!

DAMMIT

[punctum_punctum]

WHY COULDN'T YOU HAVE POSTED THIS LIKE, A FEW HOURS EARLIER?!?

I just wrote Paterson an email if he'll supervising my PhD at St. Andrew's

Re: DAMMIT

[pachamama]

Are you really coming to St A's???? How totally cool!!!!

I have been drooling over their Masters programme recently, though with current family/financial scene it will likely remain in the realm of fantasy.

Re: DAMMIT

[punctum_punctum]

If they'll take me, I'm totally going. And if they can provide a teaching gig and/or scholarship so I can afford it. All this post-MFA sitting around doing nothing in Vancouver is REALLY REALLY getting to me.

I was looking at the poetry faculty (Burnside only teaches fiction WTF?) and there's this one guy, Robert Crawford, his poetry TOTALLY BLOWS.

Re: DAMMIT

[pachamama]

Though Burnside may not lecture in poetry courses, I'm sure as a PhD student, you could still get plenty from him. And Kathleen Jamie is there, too, whom I like very much. And also remember the scene in the UK is small, and everyone knows everyone, so with judicious networking you won't be limited to just the resources there at St A's.

[timiathan]

I don't like poems to be like Rubik's Cubes anyway... :/

[pachamama]

But sometimes the process of editing one is a little like playing with a Rubik's cube -- you "fix" one problem and it causes another elsewhere, etc etc etc.

[timiathan]

Well I understand his point, but I just don't gravitate toward the view of poetry as a puzzle, something to be solved. I think it might be the most fundamental branching on the poetry tree--is poetry a puzzle, or an experience? There are poets you can unpack and try to ponder, and there are poets you just have to let bowl you over. And I greatly prefer the latter.

If fiddling with one line fundamentally changes all of the others, it's because you're seeing poetry as a kind of linguistic logical argument--A+B+C+D=E. I feel like poetry has the special ability to make entirely non-logical arguments, so viewing it as something to be "completed", even in process, cuts it off at the knees.

Not that I'm saying my opinion is the right one, or anything like that -- the puzzle view is perfectly valid. It's just not my thing. And I wish more people made the distinction--it seems like such a stark contrast to me; it's really a fundamental difference between two schools of poetry.

[novapsyche]

I recently mentioned to a friend that making an error while writing a sonnet is like dropping a stitch in knitting. You have to unravel and hope that you can rejoin things so that they appear to have been meant to be that way in the first place.

[pachamama]

I like that analogy, especially for poetry in form.