George Szirtes has an interesting post up at the moment, which starts:
One of the reasons I became a poet rather than a novelist is, perhaps, because I have a far stronger sense of events – nature as event, phenomena as event, objects as event – than of people. To most poets I suspect other people are a kind of myopic blur.
Whether it’s true for all poets or just him, the post is worth reading. No permalinks, so if you’re reading this some time in the future, you need to track down the entry for 20.12.05 .
2 replies on “Szirtes on the myopia of poets”
George Szirtes has me pegged, and that’s the truth.
Life is a myopic blur, except for those few times a day when I hyperfocus on something, usually something small and weird.
Julie
It ran a bell with me too, although I’m not sure it would be healthy to inflate my own shyness and misanthropy into a poetics.