tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6275250379782127775.post5520646481588371965..comments2024-01-17T00:37:31.991-08:00Comments on Off the Wall: Longfellow’s Children?: Reading Common-place’s Poetic Research ColumnUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6275250379782127775.post-24544142541312449282010-11-24T09:31:24.087-08:002010-11-24T09:31:24.087-08:00I really liked your post, Will. It made me think a...I really liked your post, Will. It made me think about the stories we tell and how we tell them.<br /><br />I read your piece on the same day I came across an article John Berger wrote called 'The Hour of Poetry.' In it, Berger observed,<br /><br />"Poems, even when narrative, do not resemble stories. All stories are about battles, of one kind or another, which end in victory and defeat. Everything moves towards the end, when the outcome will be known.<br /><br />Poems, regardless of any outcome, cross the battlefields, tending the wounded, listening to the wild monologues of the triumphant or the fearful. They bring a kind of peace. Not by anesthesia or easy reassurance, but by recognition and the promise that what has been experienced cannot disappear as if it had never been. Yet the promise is not of a monument, (Who, still on a battlefield, wants monuments?) The promise is that language has acknowledged, has given shelter, to the experience which demanded, which cried out....."<br /><br />With Berger's comments in mind, the choice to run poems alongside other forms of narrative raises critical questions about what you call the "gateway to deeper understanding" about the past and ways we might relate to it in the present. How can language be that gateway? Or is it perhaps a bridge?<br /><br /> I like to think that while historical writing endeavors to ask and answer questions of the past in systematic, linear and accessible ways, poetry trains the eye of language on the more elusive ebb & flow of emotions, inclinations, compulsions and renderings that resist plot lines, neat summarizations, beginnings, middles and ends...while all the while, the music of language adds layers of meaning to the words and ideas on the page.<br /><br />I had promised some poetry to my Irish history students for next week -- your post reminded me why I did that and why it matters -- thank you!Margohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16960664956090437926noreply@blogger.com