Comments on: Truth and Clarity

By: Jim K.

Jim K. — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 14:48:31 +0000

Evocation. The Surreal uses discontinuities in expectation
to force the mind to manufacture bridging material…
..the reader adapts the poem. Red Wagon is far from
Surreal, but it does have the evocatory power. In Red Wagon,
the small, immediate, close focus on symbolic things creates
a wide backstory that is vastly bigger than the scene. Like
walking around an old fort and digging up a piece of a
china teacup….the whole inferred from the part.

By: Daisy

Daisy — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 14:19:27 +0000

Hi Henry. I’m only trying to distinguish in a practical sense between my use of the words “truth” and “clarity” in the post where I took issue with Ada’s use of the word soothsaying to describe what poems do. Not trying to get us all to agree on what Truth, etc. is. Thanks for the Fry recommendation–it looks interesting. Cheers, Daisy

By: Yerra Sugarman

Yerra Sugarman — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 13:37:29 +0000

This is a possibly interesting thought as regards truth in literature. It’s from Ursula K. Le Guin’s THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS (Ace Books, 1969):
“I’ll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination. The soundest fact may fail or prevail in the style of its telling: like that singular organic jewel of our seas, which grows brighter as one woman wears it and, worn by another, dulls and goes to dust. Facts are no more solid, coherent, round, and real than pearls are. But both are sensitive…”
Best,
Yerra Sugarman

By: Henry Gould

Henry Gould — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 17:55:29 +0000

I like your use of “The Red Wheelbarrow” as illustration here.
But do you really want to define Truth as the self-evident, the obvious, the prose fact?
What if Truth is more like a poem?
Maybe the most precisely true statement anyone can make is a tautology (A = A). And Williams’ poem, you might say, celebrates the pleasure of tautology. Things are just so… THERE. The argument (”so much depends…”) sort of dribbles off…. & yet it’s a complete argument : so much (everything) depends upon the simple, brilliant THERENESS of things. Their “quiddity”, in Joyce’s sense.
Paul Fry meditates on this in his book A DEFENSE OF POETRY. From the blurb at Amazon : “The author identifies literature ontologically as a sign of the preconceptual, as the “ostensive moment” that discloses neither the purpose nor the structure of existence but existence itself, revealed in its nonhuman register.”