A Canvas for Words: Spatial and Temporal Attitudes in the Writing of Poems

摘要

If we assume the common poet's adage, that 'sometime I write the poem, sometime the poem writes me', then we can assume, because a poem is typically a written thing, that a kind of dialogue takes place between the poet and the page that is different from any dialogue that occurs when we speak. A key difference is that the page has an explicitly spatial dimension. The combination of these more spatial aspects and the more temporal aspects of sound (more frequently discussed) makes up the non-tropical wing of the poet's craft, but the spatial aspects are rarely talked about. Drawing on the old saying that 'Homer is the poet of the ear and Virgil is the poet of the eye', this essay intends to heighten awareness of the visual/spatial elements of a poem particularly so that when we return to the page to write a poem day after day we can turn ourselves toward those aspects and get a better, more artful, handle on them.