Buddha's Tears


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Choosing between sound and sense

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When readers engage with a poem, they pump in effort and attention. Where does that energy go? Usually it seeps out as paraphrasable meaning and emotion, having soaked up through the words. Sometimes the words are less permeable, so the reader might need to do some fracking - initiating small, controlled explosions under the surface to release the content. But suppose that route to the surface is blocked - where does the thwarted energy go? Readers might simply give up, cutting their losses. Alternatively, attention might spread sideways, focusing on the language, so that sound is given the role of generating meaning - not the same type of meaning obtainable through paraphrase, more the effect of a musical phrase (from now on I'll use "meaning" and "music" to distinguish the 2 effects). This "music" is often present as a secondary effect in paraphrasable poetry. Take for example the following from Eliot's "Prufrock" Of restless nights ...
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Child narrators in adult fiction

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with Elizabeth Baines and Charles Lambert Introduction Writing from a child's point-of-view isn't easy. Done well though, it can be effective and affecting, so it's worth a try. Most stories of this type use a third-person-priviledged point-of-view, though a first-person treatment is possible. Some people (me included) rarely produce child-centred stories, which is odd - after all, we were all children once. Two story collections I've read in the last year or so have a fair proportion of child-centred stories, so I thought I'd bring the authors' views into the discussion. Some writers raid their own pasts "The key, I think is memory: quite simply, remembering, never forgetting what it was like to be a child - ... when I was in my early twenties I made a conscious vow ... never to forget what it was like to be a child ... But I do also happen to have a very good memory: ... 'Leaf Memory' is based on a real-life memory of my own, aged two years and t...
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Who should I vote for?

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