Writing is embodiment. Reading is contact. In the preface to Obra poetica, Jorge Luis Borges writes: ’The taste of the apple (states Berkeley) lies in the contact of the fruit with the palate, not in the fruit itself; in a similar way (I would say) poetry lies in the meeting of the poem and reader, not in the lines of symbols printed on the pages of a book. What is essential is the aesthetic act, the thrill, the almost physical emotion that comes with each reading.’ Borges continues on to suggest that poetry can work its magic by fulfilling our profound need to “recover a past or prefigure a future.” Poetry depends on the mutuality of writer and reader. The symbols on the page alone are insufficient. Borges was a fabulist and in the foreword to his first book of poems he went even further to suggest that poetry goes beyond mutuality, beyond identification, into identity itself: ’If in the following pages there is some successful verse or other, may the reader forgive me the audacity of having written it before him. We are all one; our inconsequential minds are much alike, and circumstances so influence us that it is something of an accident that you are the reader and I the writer—the unsure, ardent writer—of my verses.’
stem: edward hirsch
perspectief: A poetry primer for the uninitiated
titel: it is something of an accident that you are the reader and I the writer
bron: how to read a poem (2006, 2013)
mopw: meerstemmige encyclopedie / appel