Tuesday, May 27, 2003
A striking throwaway phrase (there are so many of them!) from Empson's Some Versions of Pastoral: "all [Shakespeare's] people change their minds on the stage and use heightened language where the rest of us use lapse of time" (38). No doubt this is a truism of Shakespeare study trotted out in every sophomore survey course, and of course he's talking about the importance of time to psychology and nothing broader than this. But I find the equation that substitutes "heightened language" for "lapse of time" fascinating if misprised to mean that intensifying one's language can change one's experience of time: a line of poetry that takes a few seconds to read becomes an hour or a year of someone's life. When you take into account how many times you might reread a given poem, the hours one has spent in the past with, say, Shakespeare's sonnets get folded in with the hours you are going to spend. How many more times will "That time of year thou mayest in me behold" or "When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes" or "They that have power to harm and do none" fully occupy my consciousness and layer who I am at the moment of reading with who I was and will be at all the other occasions of reading? Time travel, indeed: Nick Piombino is on to something.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Popular Posts
-
This is gonna be a loooooong post. What follows is a freely edited transcription of my notes from the Zukofsky/100 conference at Columbia t...
-
Midway through my life's journey comes a long moment of reflection and redefinition regarding poetics (this comes in place of the conver...
-
Will be blogging more or less permanently now at http://www.joshua-corey.com/blog/ . Or follow me on Twitter: @joshcorey
-
My title is taken from the comments stream of an article recently published by The Chronicle of Higher Education , David Alpaugh's "...
-
Elif Batuman has amplified her criticism of the discipline of creative writing (which I've written about before ) in a review-essay that...
-
Thursday, September 29, 2011 Berlin. Fog of sleep deprivation coloring an otherwise perfect blue autumn day a sort of miasmic yellow i...
-
Trained it down to DePaul's Loop campus this morning to take part in a panel, "Why Writers Should Blog," alongside Tony Trigil...
-
In one week Lake Forest will hold its commencement and I'll take off my professor's hat for the summer. A few weeks later, in June, ...
-
Farewell, Barbara Guest .
-
That's one of my own lines. From an untitled (they're all untitled) severance song: After form fails a furling, reports dying away, ...
No comments:
Post a Comment