12 - Poetry

Summary

Language is fossil poetry.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘The Poet’ 190

Will language have the same depth and richness in electronic form that it can reach on the printed page? Does the beauty and variability of our language depend to an important degree on the medium that carries the words? Does poetry need paper?

Don DeLillo, PEN America

There's a zone I aspire to’, Don DeLillo admitted in a 1993 interview. ‘It's a state of automatic writing, and it represents the paradox that's at the center of a writer's consciousness – this writer's anyway’:

First you look for discipline and control … You want to control the flow of impulses, images, words, faces, ideas. But there's a higher place, a secret aspiration. You want to let go. You want to lose yourself in language, become a carrier or messenger … It's a kind of rapture … I think poets must have more access to this state than novelists do. (‘The Art of Fiction’)

DeLillo describes the push–pull of this writerly paradox again in 1997, associating it once more with a poetic sensibility: ‘I think that poets must know this feeling, the feeling of being willing to sacrifice meaning to pure language, let language press meaning upon you, and it's an odd thing’ (‘City Arts’). A change came in DeLillo's writing practice, he attests, while he was living in Greece and writing The Names (1982). Taking regular walks around Athens, DeLillo saw among the ruins of an ancient civilisation a new way to shape his writing practice. The ‘inscribed words and sentences on stone and marble’ (‘City Arts’) at the Parthenon began to translate to the pages of his workin-progress: DeLillo switched to typing each new paragraph on a fresh sheet of paper; small blocks of text surrounded by paginal space that resembled more the pages from a book of poems than the draft of a novel.

DeLillo has employed the same creative practice ever since, with the same, secondhand typewriter, whose solid letter-hammers he says give his writing a ‘sculptural quality’ that echoes the abstract, visual art of those ancient carved stones (‘The Art of Fiction’).