S K-B We are left
to ponder WHY poetry is so ‘memorable’ when each unrolling word/phrase is
presumably fresh, cliché-free, and unexpected — and therefore packed with
‘information’ -- and therefore more taxing to memorize?
CHW: ...googling Wikipedia on verse, poetry,
poetaster, versifier and rhymster/rhymer... It mentions condensation, which I
would call compression or distillation. Which is why I find the prolix ramblings
of, say, Whitman or Pound so tedious. What it omits, however, is the
memorability factor, which makes the timely posting above especially apt.
JM: Proust developed his ideas on
"involuntary memory". Epiphanies, such as his "madeleine unter dem Linden",
seldom occur ( Beckett counted not more than eight in Proust's entire
"Recherche").
For me, what is "memorable" about poetry is connected with my
hopes of recovering what I had felt while reading a poem. It is something
related to its "duration", the breadth of the poetic experience it
allows.
This is where "condensation" comes in handy and I'm sure both
S K-B and CHW remembered that in German, a poet is a "Dichter", while
figuratively - and in Freud - "Verdichtung"
indicates "condensation": an air-tight compression to keeps a substance, an
idea or an image alive and fresh.
Would you agree that the "memborable" function of poetry is
less linked to "recollecting it mnemonically or intellectually" than to
"recovering a spectrum of past experiences with their unspoiled freshness"?
Otherwise it would only serve the interests of nostalgic bathos and
propaganda.
My particular experience with Nabokov is a
"durable", "poetic"one, even and particularly when he writes prose ( not
the Mr.Jourdain kind, ever!). And yet, what I treasure most is how
"information is packed" by VN: Although I may
memorize sentences, like a formulae, the kernel that indicates both
past and still un-lived experiences, remains when I try to link
formula and incantation.