Post 11: Something as something else

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 “It was the first poem I had experienced not just as verbal or intellectual construct, or even as music, but somehow as a material object, a kind of sculpture.”1


I read Garth Greenwell’s newsletter that he sent out on April 26th of this year in which he talks about a Frank Bidart poem, “Overheard through the Walls of the Invisible City,” and describes the experience he had of reading it (“reading” almost seems to be a dull word to describe this) as “a kind of sculpture.” What he writes in the newsletter unravels his statement’s fitting application to this particular poem–I’ve never heard anyone talk about writing at the depths to which Garth Greenwell can and does–though even before all this, his comparison interested me in its most basic sense of describing something as something else.

I'm intrigued by the idea that the success of a form (Is “success” what it is? Is success even something a form can have?) could be to such a degree that it makes the form more like another form. And that this isn’t because of the other form being superior to the one at hand, but just because of its difference–and maybe actually because of how different it is. It interested me that Garth Greenwell’s (it feels equally impossible to refer to him either by solely his first or his last name) strength of reaction to the poem didn’t make the work feel like a super poem-y poem–it didn’t make it feel especially like what it was, but instead made it like something it was not. As though the poem was so powerful that it could be what it wasn’t in addition to what it already was (/isn't, is). Does this somehow mean that the degree of impact of the Bidart poem matches the degree of difference between poetry and sculpture? From what I think is the opposite angle, maybe the intensity of the poem’s affect is partly born from expectation–and that the farther removed a poem is from what you expect a poem to be, the closer it is to (being like) other art forms (photos, collages, paintings)? I’m picturing the names of various forms like these all within a single realm; maybe poems and sculptures happens to be next to each other in this arrangement.


Question:

How close is a poem to a sculpture?


Equivalencies:

The difference between what you expect a form to be and what it is = its length = how far it extends out to touch another medium = the density that the work has (density being something GG talks about as an important [essential] quality for creative work, which also feels like a useful term through which to think about something.)


Notes:

1Greenwell, Garth, "A Breaking Wheel," To A Green Thought, (April 26, 2024), https://garthgreenwell.substack.com/p/a-breaking-wheel?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2


Bibliography: 

Greenwell, Garth. "A Breaking Wheel." To A Green Thought. April 26, 2024. https://garthgreenwell.substack.com/p/a-breaking-wheel?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2

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