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JOHN HORVATH JR
On Novelty in Narrative Poetry
We have lost, it seems, the powers of observation to create details necessary to describe an event. In the place of observations we find reportage all too often impossible to replicate; nor can we locate a nexus of poet and poem as both occur as one simultaneous event, the one being equal to the other so that to criticize a poem is to criticize the life of its poet.
We know little of a life that is not 'mine'. In part, what we know of the poet is divulged by the poem; this circularity is an infinitissimal portion of a life. That situation gives us little on which to stage our judgements concering plot. Plot is destroyed as recognition and reversal are lost in reportage or accidental understanding. Any collection of words strung together are equally 'a poem' due to its hints and flukes of understanding. And, immediately upon being read, that same string of words might we be no poem.
Little but bickering remains to the critical reader. It is or is not a poem. The Aristotelian worlds of A and -A (not A) allow us claim and counter claim one status or other for the words which we read. Found Art objects, crafted without intent to be poetry, become poems. Less radically, rhymes become poems. In both cases we can merely count the words and rhymes to determine a 'good' from a 'bad' poem. But, as we are wont not to do such judgments, there can be no criticism. (Equally, to the degree that we lack standards for poetry, there can be no judgement of 'poetry' and, coincidetally no judgement of people.)
Evidentiary narrative
We must garner evidence as a first act of rehabilitating the poem and the critic (which is the same as the poet and the critical reader). Immediately we may ask 'what is evidence in general' and 'what is evidence specifically'. The answer of course is 'multiple narrators', who as characters draw direct attention to inconguities among varied points of view each belonging to an individual narrator who is a character (individual persona that change as a result of the recognitions and reversals found in plot). Multiple point of view invites the critic to deconstruct and reconstruct a poem; the mind of the reader engages to follow developments in plot; the words are elevated to 'text'; reading becomes a journey. As the reader is engaged, the words gather 'significance' other than that suggested by mere rhymes, events, and reports.
The evidence that is the poem requires that events present to us a possibility of observation and its probable report. Likewise, observation and report is addressed as the source of significance rather than poet and reader. Conflict that is text allows the reader to formulate multiple 'levels' of significance. Given all the same 'baggage' that I carry, another reader, even the poet, can come to the same or like conclusions as those I have.
Evidence is that observation and reportage which draws into question the individual's sense of the significant. The reader may say, 'this poem is about a horse' (an observation of fact, a report of the words having been read) or may equally grant significance to the text 'the horse represents the strong animalistic urges of lust) - in both cases equally valid but only the second statement requires accumulation of evidence to be analyzed in the textshould be able to read in the poem what I read there.
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