week one

Our readings so have essentially essentially an introduction to poetry, fleshing out basic qualities like rhyme, meter, lines breaks, and their relationship to the "music" of language, as manifest in poetry, a "language within a language". The main goal was to introduce and improve understanding of the real attributes of poetry; the qualities that make it different from prose and language in general.

Specifically, within a poem, though the vocabulary is the same, words have a completely different function--their context and significance become "symbolically charged", moving beyond literal meaning to become boldly psychological/metaphorical, and also contribute to a certain grace that is the reading experience itself. In blunt terms, poetry permits a far wider range of sentences than traditional speech, and is capable of generator a considerably vaster, more delicate kind of meaning.

I don't read poetry very often, but coincidentally (just in time for this post), I just finished a collection of poetry by Jesse Ball, "The Village on Horseback). The setup of the collection is interesting, because it's a sort of personally anthology of shorter works, each somewhere between 50 to 60 pages: one collection of poetry; one of prose poems; an extended prose poem; two novellas; and another long poem.

Ball is generally known for his prose (mainly "Samedi the Deafness"), and even here tends towards prose poetry and narrative, but it interests me to see the shift in tone between pieces, even from the same writer. In one collection, it goes from the general linearity of narrative prose to much freer, impressionistic, almost experimental poetry, that's certainly very depending on the kind of "music" Koch was outlining.