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🦋 Poetic process: structure and meaning

In the course of thinking about my idiot poem I came up with a metaphor that I like: Narrative structure has the function of a candle's wick. The flame of meaning will not adhere to a wick-less text. Thinking of meaning as the flame that burns in text (without consuming it), one which will dissipate if it does not have a wick, can take me in a lot of directions; one that seems especially promising is to think of song and poetry as a way of providing additional structure in which to anchor meaning so the narrative thread need not be as strong. (This ties in nicely with a take on Wittgenstein, "Whereof one cannot speak, one must sing.")

The structure of the poem as I am seeing it now is,

1. The idiot cannot speak. His story is full of sound and fury raging unexpressed.
2. The idiot speaks. This is represented as a mechanical process, the unwinding of a clockwork. The web of his story unravels and its meaning evaporates.
3. The idiot sings. His sung story becomes the landscape and its meaning the universe.
4. The idiot falls silent, sleeps. The story he told assumes divine status i.e. pure meaning in the firmament -- its structure does not persist.

posted morning of Monday, December 31st, 2012
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