You all lost me with all your "I's."  Read the damn thing, either you like
it or you don't, don't try to analyze it to death.  Ruth


At 8:48 AM -0500 2/15/08, Gabriel Orgrease wrote:
In respect of a friendly author this morning asking a question of authors:

"If it was really Shelley who stood and listened to the skylark, it was not
Shelley in any important sense; he did not mean for me, reading the poem,
to be thinking about him listening to the bird; he was entirely willing to
vanish, and to let me become the 'I'." - Mary Oliver
----
Don't you think that modern authors are not willing to vanish--that they so
desperately want to be part of the story. Yes? No? Maybe so?

I know I need to vanish more.

-----------------------------------

And my response:

There are different flavors of 'I'. The I that I like is the one wears a
mask. That I that wrote that is no longer this I. What mask was that? This
I reads that I and wonders who that I was. Though this I that pops up here
so insistently likes to play with micro-bursts where the I mimics and
pretends to evoke real time communication... as you read this I am writing
this but no, actually, I am driving now in my truck to the fish market but
you cannot see that because I left this message for you at the time it is
marked and now it is not me here speaking my I to your I. The modernist
technique of removal of the I from the narrative context of the text is as
inauthentic as to push the author's I into your face... but my you is not
you as your I is more you than it is me. Then there are those narrators who
are simply liars like a trickster. I am not actually in my truck going to
the fish market.

][<en
-- 
Ruth Barton
[log in to unmask]
Dummerston, VT

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