Monday, October 5, 2009

Printed Word-The Death of Poetry!

And as such I read an essay by hero Lawrence Ferlinghetti who explained how he felt that in the 1950s the advent of the printed word has in fact contributed to the subtle suppression of poetry in its purest form, and that the Beats hoped to achieve a new kind of "street poetry" which was much more verbal-and I wonder why the two cannot be equalized into one? The printed word has just as much power as the spoken word, in terms of organization, capitalization, punctuation ect., I feel that has certainly been exemplified expertly on many occasions, particularly in the work of ee cummings, Jack Kerouac's spontaneous prose method, and one of my favorite writings of all time, the second section (Quentin Section) of William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury. Particularly the last example as it is the most specific of the examples I have provided, I am able to clearly see that the character of Quentin's progression towards suicide and breakdown of logical train of thought giving way to the emotional conquer of depression is evident in Faulkner's abandonment of punctuation and paragraphical construction. I have written many an essay on this, in fact, which I do not care to share here, but I felt the need to write on this subject. The spoken word is indeed powerful, and I am not certain yet in my life if there is anything more powerful than the human voice, be it Adolf Hitler's famous speeches of the Reich or the howling of Jim Morrison's proclamation that we, in fact, "Want the world and we want it NOW". However, the printed word and command of any language is in no way inferior, and in the way I have chosen to take Lawrence's comment, I must respectfully disagree, o mentor.

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