Space Time Silences

Frank Bidart in an interview with Christopher Hennessy

If a poem's any good, it must be a visceral experience. The way the eye moves down the page is physical. A body exists in space. A poem exists in space. Words on the page exist in space in the way that words spoken aloud exist in time. Words in time are surrounded by silence; words on the page are surrounded by space. It's not a simple equivalence, a matter of a space being like a pause, but you have to make a dynamic on the page that corresponds to the dynamic of the word, as it exists in the sentence as you hear it in your mind.

From Outside The Lines: Talking with Contemporary Gay Poets.

And so for day 1023
01.10.2009