quotidian/numinous

[truepenny]

The thing I was trying and failing to describe the other day (scroll down past the sonnet) is this:

Modern poetry, when it is doing what it is designed to do, makes the quotidian numinous.

There was a panel at WisCon a few years ago about writing better ("Diving Deeper" was the title); it ended up trying to go several different directions at once, because the panelists had at least two and possibly three extremely distinct ideas about what it was the panel was trying to do. China Miéville and I were trying to talk about how to bring the numinous into short fiction; once you've got the basics of story-telling down, how do you make the story more than a story? I still want to have that conversation sometime with somebody, but it's the sort of thing that needs hours or days or possibly a lifetime, just to try to get the vocabulary worked out and a common understanding of what you're aiming for. Because the defining point of the numinous in art is that you can't exactly articulate it.

And I know ways to reach for the numinous when I'm dealing with sf/f/h; theme and image and the choices the characters make and why they make them. I can't get there every time out of the gate, but I know enough to try. But I can't do it at all for everyday life; I don't have the eye or the ear, or the seventh or eighth sense it needs to take the ordinary and make it luminous.

heres_luck is a poet. She can make it work.

Comments

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

Modern poetry, when it is doing what it is designed to do, makes the quotidian numinous.

Yup. Prose, too (you're going to be so sick of hearing me say this) - it's one of the things they can both do. One of the reasons why I Just Don't Get modern art is that, for me, any form of art is about pointing to something and saying "Hey, look at this. This is how I see it..."

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Yes, since all three of the things I linked to are prose.

The thing, though, is that modern fiction--not so much modern essays, but I don't write essays any more than I write poetry, which is to say barely, and I don't feel qualified to talk about what they do--seems to be intent on denying the numinous. I don't read very much non-genre fiction, but that's partly because it doesn't make the quotidian numinous for me. It seems desperately determined to stare unflinchingly at the lack of the numinous in everyday life.

And the particular thing I love in modern poetry--and in these prose vignettes of heres_luck's--is the way they don't feel constrained to have a narrative. I personally can't do that; story is what shapes my imagination. And I think story gets in the way of this particular kind of beauty.

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

Yes, since all three of the things I linked to are prose.

Which is one of the things that confused me about your remarks.

Thanks for this - clarification? elaboration? And if that's how it looks to you, all I can say is that it works a bit differently for me.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I was using "poetry" as shorthand, more for "short-form pieces, in words, that eschew plot in favor of this particular quality that I'm labeling inadequately as finding the numinous in the quotidian." Most of the texts I know of that manage this particular trick are poems, but that, in a chicken-and-egg sort of quandary, is more because (I think) poetry is the form in which, in the current literary climate, that particular choice is not merely allowed but applauded. Not because prose can't do it, but because there isn't an accepted category of prose works that fills the same niche as "poem." So if you want to do that sort of thing, and you're good at it, you learn all about line-breaks and enjambment and the rest of the formal tricks of poetry and become a poet. Which is a grossly reductive view, but the particular thing modern poems that I love do, and that h.l.'s vignettes do, is something that has been apportioned out to poetry, and if you want to do it, that's where you go.

This is my opinion only, and (as I have said other places) I'm not a poet. I may be talking utterly through my hat.

[mmarques.livejournal.com]

Thanks for explaining it. I have been feeling that I just don't get most modern poetry, but I'll read again with these thoughts in mind.