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A Poem Has No Choice But To Avoid Itself

05.04.2013 by Ed Carson //

To get at the centre of a poem, you first have to get very far away from it, so time and distance need to be constantly in play.

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Categories // Open Book Toronto

Poetry Auspices (Literally, Looking At Birds)

04.28.2013 by Ed Carson //

Like a flock of birds, a poem is often anti-narrative, obscuring its sense of beginning, middle or end, reflecting its own internal momentum and evolving emergent contours and forms. A poem seeks simultaneous order and disorder in its structures and aesthetic mix, filtering through its diction and syntax both the simple and complex, seeing both what belongs as well as that which appears not to belong.

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Categories // Open Book Toronto

The Snare of Poetry (A Trap for Catching Birds or Animals)

04.23.2013 by Ed Carson //

Poetry can be thought of as a snare for thinking. Offering neither clear answers nor resolutions, its puzzle/riddle-like quality has the form or force of a question where the answer is contained within the question. It doesn’t provide directions, but rather presents predicaments the reader must alone encounter and interpret.

What a poem does is find itself from the inside out; its centres of thought draw together its periphery, giving birth to the force of reciprocal influences. The complex of words and syntax of a poem rearranges fixed ways of understanding what is happening by actively undermining and then re-building relationship and presence, time and perspective. You can’t understand or think about just one thing for long; your mind must wander endlessly in search of a way out.

Categories // Open Book Toronto

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Recent Posts

  • The Fireflies of Poetry
  • What a Poem Does, Not what it Means
  • The “Place” of Poetry and the Brain’s GPS
  • A Poem is a Rhetoric of Substance and Selection
  • A Map of Reading From Zero to Infinity

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