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Post by jpazdziora on Dec 11, 2009 13:35:46 GMT -5
amberlee--you wuz nice to me, i be nice to you! Not too long at all.
Sorry it's taken me a while to get back to this--I've been tied up at my own blog lately. There's a number of things that occur to me to say, but in consideration of the depth of thought you've clearly put into this, let me take the weekend to mull it over and write up a response in kind. Should have it up early next week. Thanks!
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Post by amberlee on Dec 14, 2009 13:35:41 GMT -5
Sounds great, looking forward to it!
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Post by jpazdziora on Dec 16, 2009 18:47:40 GMT -5
Here's a reply that hopefully does justice to your post. I've also put a copy of it up at my blog. Let me know what you think...it's meant to generate questions as much as answer them.
amberlee – thanks again for your post. Let start with a quick confession—I’m completely fascinated with musicals as an art form. I’ve divided my poetic energy over the past few years between ‘literary’ poetry and ‘lyrics’, of the musical sort.
In fact, a few years back when I was going through a terribly difficult period in my relationship with my then girlfriend (now wife—it worked out to a happy ending!), I actually wrote more lyrics than poems. Don’t know what that says about me psychologically, but it says something about the latent power of the art form. Lyrics, too, can house potent and emotive self-expression.
So yes, I think you’re spot on with your ideas regarding musicals. Even as literary writers, we shouldn’t ignore the medium. It’s very different from literary poetry, of course, but no less difficult and promising in its way.
In re your questions—I’m not sure whether love is a choice or not. Certainly it’s not ‘self-authenticating’, in the sense that it is a choice I make to assert my personhood. And there’s a strong element of the haphazard in love—the way the light caught her hair, the way he smiled, that really cute pickup line. Suddenly this person, this friend or colleague or neighbour, becomes something more, someone other. Often enough, that sort of attraction seems arbitrary, almost irrational.
But there are choices surrounding that. Constant and perpetual choices we never stop needing to make. Staying in to do homework instead of going for coffee, letting the phone go to voicemail. We might not choose where love will glimmer, but we can and do choose to nurture it, or let it die—which sometimes, sadly enough, it needs to.
That may be why the people you know can talk about ‘choosing’ to stay with someone. We do not need to make ‘validating choices’ to vindicate our own self-worth, or demand ‘validating actions’ from our partner, but we do need to make choices to affirm our earlier validation that, yes, I will love this person and not let that love die. From the initial invitation to coffee onwards, both people make choices that will validate or cancel the embryonic flutter of love.
The poetry of love can and should explore all these things. Yes, we do ‘have a responsibility to look at ourselves and break down this isolation’—the isolation of ourselves from ourselves, from others, the smothering of our questioning for truth in the garble of cliché. Our writing descends into the particular of our experience, our emotion, and so become wide enough to touch the world. Because, really, everyone knows what it’s like to treasure ‘the way you hold your knife | the way you drink your tea.’
A love poem—George MacDonald’s brooding ‘Love me, Beloved’, or Yeats’s haunting ‘Aedh wishes for the Cloths of Heaven’, for instance—takes those immediate, emotional experiences and burrows through them in search of truth, of hope. In a way, it’s like the therapy you mentioned, reflecting on what’s happened to make sense of it. (But a poem, of course, moves in more directions than just emotional—rational.)
I’m not sure, these days, who’s writing like this, or what the best medium for it is. Certainly, as writers we’re called to explore, are we not? Regardless of what has or has not been written, even regarding engaging and respecting it, we need to write into our own moments—words that subvert the triviality and complacency of a loveless society.
When did we lose love? I don’t know the Poetic Canon that well myself, but I think it was somewhere amid the postwar cynicism of the 20th century. War, genocide, and materialism, it seemed, had subverted lyricism of the Romantics and the optimism of the Victorians. One reason I appreciate WB is how evocatively it captures so many of the struggles and anger that arise out of our ‘loss of love.’
When, conversely, did we lose our sense of being the Beloved? I think that, of all things, is the hardest but most wonderful of all lessons to learn and ideas to explore, in poems or out of them. If we can realize not just that we can love ourselves, that we can love, but that we are loved, then we have the hope to look up.
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