A poem is about many things and the literal sense is only one of them. The rhetorical and musical features of poetry are as intrinsic to a formal poem as its ostensible meaning, which may be little more than a coat hanger; the dazzling gown draped on that hanger may be made of quite other elements.
- Stephen Edgar, in the April 2008 issue of POETRY Magazine, on translating Anna Akhmatova
I was rereading my old POETRYs and refound this quote, which I love. The hanger business is apropos – I just cut out the unused pages from a journal I stopped writing in 2001 to avoid writing about something sad. I am binding them, by hand, to one severed limb of a plastic coat hanger, to make a new journal. I haven’t done this since I made a blank book from a make-a-book kit as a kid, and that book was so pretty I didn’t want to write in it. This one is nice and ugly and serviceable.
November 17, 2008 at 3:35 pm
Posted @ 7:33AM PST 11/17/08
Dara? How do you use a bit of coat hanger to make a book. What is a make-a-book kit? Never heard of such a thing.
Phil
November 20, 2008 at 5:25 pm
just as a binding, like how you can bind a book around a stick