Recharging Your Batteries!

Friday, I attended the poetry reading celebrating nonviolence at IPFW. Listening to poetry read aloud is always a pleasure for me. It increases my energy, recharges my spirit! I understand there are very good poets (Norman Dubie is one who comes to mind) who don't see poetry this way, but I have always found the strength of a poem to be associated with the pleasure it gives when it's heard. I'm not claiming all poetry should be lyric, or songlike. In fact, my own preferred mode as a poet is closer to narrative than lyric.

Having said that, I want to emphasize something that I think I said in the "lost" comment I made to Rebecca's first blog. While I have worked very hard to stress the commonalities shared between the research done by fiction writers, poets, academic researchers, business and technical researchers, and teachers, there are differences. And while all work with the "stuff" of knowledge, the percepts, affects, and concepts, the so-called creative writers work with the knowledge in a quite different way. I think it has to do with the kind of "illumination" Rebecca talks about. The great cultural theorist, Walter Benjamin called this the "aura" of great art. The French philosopher Deleuze said something to the effect that, in the hands of the artist, the percept became more than a perception, the affect more than an emotion.

What do you think?