I sent my future self a message, years ago
marking poets and poems in an anthology on my shelves
None of the Above, edited by Michael Lally in 1976
for future reading
Now I am receiving that message,
re-reading these poems I've marked
I am that future self, now, but really
a present one, here and now
The self that sent the message is a past one, now
though present at the time, or so I thought
Time is usually compressed, in narratives. Even the Aristotelian unity of time, in its neoclassical interpretation, sets a limit of one day, with the play itself lasting a few hours. A biopic lasts a couple of hours, representing an entire life. The opposite of narrative, as in Ulysses, a long novel dealing with events of a single day, is rightly seen as innovative.
Musical time: a single solo might be 50 seconds, but a lot is going on there. Time is intensely filled.
In the show The Good Wife, the governor was constantly shuttling between locations in Chicago and in the State Capital, Springfield IL. In the fictional universe of the show, there was very little distance between this two places, when in actuality it is 400 miles round trip. The reason was a need for compressing time in the interests of dramatic efficiency. We can't have the governor 6 hours a day in the car.
I'm not sure my position on triviality can be defended. How can I say that a certain kind of poetry is aesthetically trivial? For me it's the idea of bathos: we get a build-up, an idea that a certain kind of poetry is super important, central to something, and then we get the poem itself...
Don't get me wrong: bathos is my favorite trope, when used intentionally.
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An example: I was reading something by Rothenberg, and he refers, quite earnestly, to Carlos Castañeda, the worst kind of new-age charlatan.
There is political bathos too, which I won't get into right now. Let's say resisting Trump (a good idea!) but in a gesture that seems trivial, however meaningful and earnest it is to the resister. Let's order a Canadian beer today! That'll show em.
I've come across this recently, in widely differing contexts: a very well-constructed theoretical argument, academically impeccable by current standards, but then the poetry it is supposedly illustrating is aesthetically trivial. Then, looking back at the argument, it looks pretentious in proportion to what it is going to explain.
Dressing up a simple fact in theoretical pretention: that is not the purpose of theory. The purpose would be to explain something that otherwise wouldn't make sense.
I woke in the middle of the night and was thinking this:
Narrative time is elastic. A 400 page novel can recount events of 80 years, 2 months, or a day. It can be read in a week, a month, or two years. Reading narrative is also an exercise in absorption. Time stops when reading.
Dramatic time is real time, but expanded or contracted. A play takes 2 hours to watch. It represents events of 1 day or so, but each scene is in real time, so to speak. Dramatic time can imitate narrative time, with 10 years between acts, etc... "Jumping oer times/ Turning the accomplishments of many years / into an hourglass." Going to the theater means going there, sitting for a while, and being absorbed in the spectacle.
Lyric time is time stopped, a single moment of time. The poem is short, and does not narrate any significant length of time. The time of reading is ruminative. The poem is read once, or twice, perhaps memorized, returned to over and over again. There is a different kind of absorption.
This is obviously an oversimplification. There are several variables: how long the action of the work takes, how long it takes to read / watch to work / the kind of absorption involved.
I heard a talk and a question was asked: "how is your work 'decolonial'." The answer was that the researcher asked the indigenous people she was working with whether they preferred to talk in Spanish or in their own language. That seems like a good practice. But it seems also like a small-ish thing, on which to hook a larger claim.
