Poesia 253 - Don Paterson, Indian poetry

Some poets travel better than others, but quite a few of them have made the journey to Italy this month. Issue 153 of the Italian periodical Poesia has 14 pages about Don Paterson and 15 pages of poems in English by Indian writers (Dom Moraes, A.K.Ramanujan, Ezekiel). In the introduction to Paterson, Massimiliano Morini emphasises that Paterson is hard to categorise - MacNiece or Muldoon? In his variety he's compared to Edwin Morgan, who gets a half-page obituary later in the magazine.

A response to Don Paterson's "The Empty Image"

Don Paterson's "The Empty Image: a new model of the poetic trope", available from his Ars Poetica page has more in it than I can comment upon or understand, but I'll mention a few points.

• I don't think he's saying much that's new, but he doesn't claim to. I think he's saying that word-meanings create provisional context which in turn modifies word-meanings (and modifies reading strategy). The modification might be more than just a tweak: ground might become tenor, details might become symbolic, and v.v.. These feedback loops operate on several features, not just along the part-whole axis but also along transparent-opaque, sound-layout etc. Readers are likely to recontextualize as they read, delaying the processing of the raw material until the appropriate methods of processing become clearer.
• "discredited lines of philosophical thought ... persist in the literary sphere long past their sell-by-date" - I've noticed that too.
• "shouldn't talk about what the poem or an image means, so much as what meaning it generates" - I think that's the only way to do it. Within a certain group/context (e.g. of mainstream UK poets) there may be so much agreement about a poem's meaning and quality that one might, as a short-hand, say that the poem contains meaning, but give the text to a US avant-gardist and you'll get a surprise.
• He says "My definition of overinterpretation is the avowal of the presence of effects ... discovered in your post-reading critical vivisection. I think these are to be strongly distrusted" but later says "We find ourselves attuned only to a small part of the electromagnetic spectrum, and whatever universe our senses conjure up for us is not the universe" - I re-read to compensate for my narrow tuning using telescopes, microscopes, (and Google, syllable-counting) etc, otherwise I'd miss too much. I need to re-read to catch up with some of my peers who don't have the blindspots that I have. Where does re-reading end and overinterpretation begin?
• "Poets coin new metaphors that either reveal underlying mappings in existing conceptual metaphors, or - more often - they innovate new conceptual mappings" - I like this part of his essay, and the consequences.
• "That dynamic is bidirectional; take 'the moon is a dinner plate'" - by chance a Judy Brown poem has "a thick white saucer like a worn-out moon, brittle from too much shining"!

2 related little stubs I've produced are

• Attention, Agility and Poetic Effect - "Two issues relating to Attention are 1) what is being focussed on, and 2) the narrowness and intensity of the focus. Here I attempt to describe the effects of some poetic features. The up/down directions mentioned below pertain to the hierarchy formed by letters, words/sound, localized meaning, and general meaning. The in/out direction is relative to the text...."
• Poetic Requirements - "To increase the poetic effect of a text, you can make the text more poetic, or you can make the reader adopt a more poetic approach. ... But of course there's more to it than having a text and a reader - the 2 need to get together under suitable conditions. In Acumen 54 (Jan 2006) Judy Gahagan wrote 'the once unique poetry habitat is a threatened one', a metaphor which can be extended. When a species' habitat shrinks, a few things are likely to happen ..."