btw, My Norton Safe Web Lite told me this website is not safe, meaning there are threats to the safety of my computer on this site.

Amo,

Peter

Peter, any website can be hacked if the hackers are determined enough.

The only guarantee against such hacking is to possess nothing worth stealing, which is the method I subscribe to fully.


Les

Have I missed anything of interest?

Coolness Pete,

What could possibly make you think you're safe here?



Ange

Creepy, isn't it?

I would post more poems on this forum if it would let me. These days I get that damn error message so often I just feel frustrated by the process. When that happens I go to Mary's Home Away From Home Poetry to post my poem their and just forget about this place till next time it refuses to let me post.

Cheers,

Peter

seems like this is the thread I find for my bitching.

I saw an interview on public television with British author, Martin Amis, in which he made a statement about authors of literature vs. authors of poetry. He said that to be an effective novelist one must possess a certain "universality" , which is not necessary for the poet.

I wonder if anyone out there would like to comment on Martin's statement.


Les

I guess, Les, I'd prefer to comment on how you decided your last, best poem worked than to discuss silly comments by famous people. What Amis said has nothing at all to to with poets, poetry, novel writing, as far as I can tell, or sunbathing. As someone who has written rough drafts of hundreds of essays since 1963, filled toilet-bowls with great works of narrative, and written a couple handfuls of poems I am really proud of, but no novels, I call some of the pieces I write poems because of the proximity to common language...sometimes even ceasing to bother call them poems when I successfully match common speech. This is one of the hundreds of way I explore to write the next poem Others sometimes seem to have the process down to a few strategies. I keep forgetting what I've learned. It seems some concern for genre definition is needed to understand what Amis says, though the statement somehow sounds like it was make half a century ago, before so many writer went through the task of finding distinctions between prose and poetry, novels and memoirs were not hard and fast. Subject matter doesn't seem to matter in saying something's a poem. It may be that to say something's a poem is to be saying it has a certain effect on the reader, which makes some novels poems in my estimate - not poetic! University of expression or conception does not seem to be a defining quality of anything I'd attempt only because I do not believe human Being is complete or completable enough to have a generalizable essence or so-called human nature. You'd have to somehow think of us as if we were more like a rock or an Angel, something definable and complete to even begin to talk about the universality of one of our forms of discourse. I think we are still making it up, which allows Martin Amis room to propose a universality to the novelist's product. I don't know what he thinks the relation of the process to the product is...but it might be novel.

Thanks for raising the question, It may be worth going over again and again, til the tea cools down.

Cheers,

Peter

ps the particularizing mind and the generalizable mind is an old saw in philosophical talk about poets ... which doesn't get any poetry written, though it can get you kicked out of the City.

Peter, my initial reaction to Amis' statement was probably similar to yours. But as I reflect more on his comment, I think what he was getting at is that a poet is more "narrator" specific in point of view than is the novelist. I knew that I could rely on you to have an opinion about such a topic.

As to being kicked out of the city, I'll side with Groucho Marx who quipped: "I wouldn't belong to any club who would have me as a member".


Les