Leo Wong on
Literature holds like magic, until literary criticism comes along and has it like a Russian doll purging at a pinpoint. Forms and genres exist like cats and dogs, but they are meant to breed into some kind of new animal that no one will care to recognize. The act of reading poems is strange and kind of pretty, only when their muses belong not to me.
Literature is strange, but literature is productive. Whether you like J.L.Lowes or I.A.Richards, there is a place for you, (but not just yet).
Whoever said writing about writing is easier than writing about sounds, movements, politics, and particles because they feed on the same medium, I would tell them that words– the building blocks of languages are made of sounds, movements, politics, dynamics, particles and so much more.
Complicating the simplicity of language is the act of thinking about language, otherwise known as linguistics. Complicating the act of enjoying reading is thinking about why you enjoy reading it, otherwise known as literary studies.
Oscar Wilde said:
The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.
We say: Once you admire something intensely, it ceases to be useless.
That being said there lies the distinction between good and bad literature. Texts that are either chosen, have earned their worth, or have been rediscovered after laying dormant for however many thousand years and re-popularized did that for a reason.
In poetry, we might call that poetic power. When text makes you feel a certain way, then it is worth examining what you are feeling and why are you feeling that way. Not me, not the poem, not Mr Bowen, you, du, vous.
Glyn Maxwell describes four requisite characteristics that you perceive when you meet the poem face to face: Solar, Lunar, Musical, and Visual. I don’t know about you, but if I were to fall for someone, I would fall for someone both pleasant in character and pleasant in appearance. Perhaps a simpler sentence would be a good poem has to be an all-rounder.
This is why we spend all the time talking about texts that are written in a language that ceases to be read as well as those that are attempting to produce a language for the world to read. By studying ‘literature’, you are learning to process texts that refuse to be read; you are grasping ideas that refuse to be written down; until we arrive at this same point where we are not afraid, where we feel frustrated, feel tearful, feel agitated, feel joyful but also telling ourselves that we are actively feeling all those simultaneously every time.
We study poems by rhyme, metre, form, content, imagery, soundscape, only to make sure to apply those parameters to a wild tiger.
How weird that does sound. How little we think about what we think.
Your writing has to make sense. So does mine.