Denis Fodor wrote: >Stirling, kindly tipping us to the inner meaning of his lyrics sheds light >on a particularly murky problem: > >>What does "Sensucht" suggest but - "senses" - the opening and >>closing words of both stanzas are Sensuous, and Senses [?]... > >Sensucht as a title strikes one as a strident solecism, whether inadvertent >or deliberate. If inadvertent, it doesn't belong there; if deliberate >it keys the lyrics to the sardonic mood-- which, it transpires, does not >inform the body of the lyric. Readers ought to have more faith - if the advise to a poet to, while drawing strength of direct yearning, to express obliquely is not sardonic, then it isn't anything. After some consideration I altered the last two lines to read However, feint at meaning - Thought: near to inner senses. To make the use of the word feint more clearly an imperative. Though this interupts the flow of the verse somehat it is not too terrible. Mr. Fodor raises some serious objections to my stylistic means, which deserve some serious reply. They seem to be: He does not like to puzzle over individual words. He does not like the use of unexpected words. He does not like the contradiction between the lyrical and the ironic juxtaposed in a single verse. He thinks the trail of meaning too tenuous. He does not like the poetical device which creates meaning for the construction "Sensucht". Easiest things first. The poem is of fine lyric surface, like all fine - that is pure - things, the surface it presents is related, but not the same as, its intrinsic structure. One reason for presenting my ideas with this kind of a surface, rather than a more jagged modernistic one, is to make it easier to accept the verse as verse, without necessarily being able to parse all of its meaning. It sucedes on the first level if one can read it and sense the prosodic ordering. Having had a few readers of iot by noiw, I find that it does do this on consistent basis. As the previous post noted it is very conservative in its construction - the only real twist being that English Blank verse favors units of 2 and 4 rather than 3. But the use of three line units is forced by the reference - to Dante, and by the word chosen for treatment - "Sehnsucht". That individual words stand out as being away from the general texture is not accidental. Instead each of the words which are translated between the two verses have specific and important functions. The yearing/yearning pair is crucial, so is the different use of the word crowning/crowned and most importantly faint and feint. Indeed the message of the poem is that however faint the outlines of the poetical are, the meaning is "near to inner senses". The puzzling over indivvidual words is in fact, specifically part of the experience of the poem, the juxtaposition of familiar lyric surface with unfamiliar twist of meaning part of the artistic intent. For those who want everything lock step in their art, I can provide little in the way of sustenance - contradiction is the source of all drama, and polyphony the source of the lyrical. The first because without divided expectations and sympahties there is no concern for th outcome, nor doubt of its progress, and the second because the lyrical is the experiential, and to be faithful to our experience - which is one of many layered thoughts and feelings progressing at once. Without unexpected words, there is no poetic meaning here, merely one thought repeated twice, greeting card like. - - - Which brings me to the objection that I should provide more of a trail so that the reader is certain of his track. I think that the facts of careful construction - metrical and acrostic ought to be enough to surely stamp the work as being possessed of careful web of construction. More would be tasteless. In the end this objection amounts to a belief by Mr. Fodor that the poem makes too many demands, takes up too much space. It is only a little lyric, and should not enforce a more viscuous progress through it, it should be scanned and panned. To this I can only reply that the verse does what it does to achieve its effect, without the slowing enforced by its construction, the thought is over before it has begun, a kind of dreamy progress through dream worlds is essential. - - - The last objection is the most serious, and it is the one for which there is no easy reply: it goes to Mr. Fodor not liking what it is this poem does artistically. He engages it, finds the experience in it, and does not like the contradictory expression which it evokes in him, he does not like the rules of spell checking which it violates in pursuit of that expression, and he does not like the way the verse uses superposition and self-similarity to achieve its effects. Part of this I can say is of the novelty of the form - he's only encountered two poems like this, and thought perhaps that this was a simple translation from some verse of Hoffman's that he was not familiar with. Instead the title too, tropes strangly - the poem is a translation, and it is after the ideas of Hoffman. Rather than being a translation of a poem "Sehnsucht" by Hoffman. This turning - of a literary work which claims to be another literary work, but then reveals that it is not, is as old as Don Quijote. If one of the opinion that it has been all down hill since Petrarch, then I can't say much other than - your probably won't like this work, which owes to Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Hoffman and a bit to Borges and Byron. But the other part is a hard objetion which cannot be met. If a reader decided that a work produces in him experiences which he does not desire, which however intended by the author are unwelcome, it is beyond the authors control. The author has created artistic expression, expression which evokes the desired response - but I cannot make you like the response, nor can I force the ideas which the poem works with from that response. There are (many) people admittedly queasy about my demand that art can be both rigorous intellectually and lyrical. Some say that structure is all, that the artists inner drive is everything, and so long as there has been execution, the artist has sufficed in his duty. There are others who want art to be all mysterious ressonance, that somehow it is ruined by being explained or by having deeper layers. To both of these camps my work will fall on deaf ears. I am neither ressolute in my defense of artistic progress irrespective of an audience, nor am I unbending in my demand that art is solely about ones response to its immament surface. That is the reader's right - to reject. But it is also the artist's right to demur and ask "is this really just and sufficent ground to reject the work? Because it makes - of all things - uncomfortable with its methods?" Stirling S Newberry [log in to unmask]