I believe every space and comma is a living part of the poem and has its function, just as every muscle and pore of the body has its function. And the way the lines are broken is a functioning part essential to the poem's life.
I believe content determines form, and yet that content is discovered only in form. Like everything living, it is a mystery. The revelation of form itself can be a deep joy; yet I think form as means should never obtrude, whether from invention or carelessness, between the reader and the essential force of the poem, it must be so fused with that force.
—Denise Levertov, from her statement for Donald Allen’s anthology The New American Poetry: 1945–1960.
Showing posts with label content. Show all posts
Showing posts with label content. Show all posts
erotics of art
What is needed, first, is more attention to form in art. If
excessive stress on content provokes
the arrogance of interpretation, more extended and more thorough descriptions
of form would silence. What is needed
is a vocabulary—a descriptive, rather than prescriptive, vocabulary—for forms.
The best criticism, and it is uncommon, is of this sort which dissolves
considerations of content into those of form.
[…]
Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a
work of art, much less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already
there. Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all.
The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works
of art—and, by analogy, our own experience—more, rather than less, real to us.
The function of criticism should be to show how
it is what it is, even that it is
what it is, rather than to show what
it means.
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In place of hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.
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