from the winter 2000 issue of lit.
Last August, poets Marjorie Welish and John Koethe engaged in an email conversation about the present and future of poetry.
...
JK
I tend to think of philosophy not so much in terms of topics and subject matter (for instance, the term "analytic philosophy" is by now virtually meaningless as a descriptive label) as in terms of the methodology I mentioned, as well as goals, in both of which I think it differs from poetry. Philosophy tries to get it (whatever "it" may happen to be) right, whereas the idea that a poem should try to get something right in that sense seems absurd. One can be persuaded by or disagree with what a philosopher says, yet those responses to a poem seem largely inappropriate or beside the point. This is not to say that poetry can't incorporate the kinds of propositions and language one encounters in philosophical writing, but just that they have a different status. Let me wax autobiographical to illustrate part of what I mean. One of my formative intellectual experiences, which influences how I think about these matters, occurred in the summer of 1967, a summer I spent reading Proust (this was long before deconstruction, so the experience is untainted). In either The Captive or The Sweet Cheat Gone, the narrator says something like, "What is love but the heart grown conscious of separation in time and space?" and when I read this I had the familiar "How true!" response. But then it occurred to me that if you replaced "conscious" with "unconscious," the resulting observation, while more banal than the original, would also seem true. I think this suggests something peculiar about how thought and language operate in poetry, and how they differ from their role in philosophy. Robert Lowell constantly revised the poems that make up History, and someone once told me that one kind of revision he made was to replace a lot of sentences with their negations. I don't know if this is true, but it wouldn't surprise me at all.
Last August, poets Marjorie Welish and John Koethe engaged in an email conversation about the present and future of poetry.
...
JK
I tend to think of philosophy not so much in terms of topics and subject matter (for instance, the term "analytic philosophy" is by now virtually meaningless as a descriptive label) as in terms of the methodology I mentioned, as well as goals, in both of which I think it differs from poetry. Philosophy tries to get it (whatever "it" may happen to be) right, whereas the idea that a poem should try to get something right in that sense seems absurd. One can be persuaded by or disagree with what a philosopher says, yet those responses to a poem seem largely inappropriate or beside the point. This is not to say that poetry can't incorporate the kinds of propositions and language one encounters in philosophical writing, but just that they have a different status. Let me wax autobiographical to illustrate part of what I mean. One of my formative intellectual experiences, which influences how I think about these matters, occurred in the summer of 1967, a summer I spent reading Proust (this was long before deconstruction, so the experience is untainted). In either The Captive or The Sweet Cheat Gone, the narrator says something like, "What is love but the heart grown conscious of separation in time and space?" and when I read this I had the familiar "How true!" response. But then it occurred to me that if you replaced "conscious" with "unconscious," the resulting observation, while more banal than the original, would also seem true. I think this suggests something peculiar about how thought and language operate in poetry, and how they differ from their role in philosophy. Robert Lowell constantly revised the poems that make up History, and someone once told me that one kind of revision he made was to replace a lot of sentences with their negations. I don't know if this is true, but it wouldn't surprise me at all.