Posts Tagged ‘ ren powell ’

An interview with Ren Powell, Big Tent Poetry Sideshow Barker

10 questions: poetry & technology (an interview series by Nic Sebastian at Very Like a Whale)

I love that language can be presented on the page with clauses that have to be seen and connected in the mind, that a metaphor about grief can hover in a collection until it is completed twenty pages later in a poem about a dog. But there was a time when Scandinavian poets used complicated meters and they could make those kinds of wonderful epic artworks through memory and aural performance. We’ve lost that, as poets and as audience members. We will certainly lose something of Poetry along the way. I expect we will have a newly defined form of Poetry through which to express our grief.

One of the neat things about this series at Very Like a Whale is that a number of our Sideshow Barkers are included, as well as other folks we read regularly. Look for January O’Neil and Dave Bonta’s responses soon, and be sure to read the entire series.

Click on the excerpt to read the entire article. Check our About page for a list of other Sideshow Barkers, friends of Big Tent Poetry who are generous enough to share with us their columns, interviews and reviews. There is no set schedule for these appearances; willy-nilly is a symptom of creative genius!

A column by Ren Powell, Big Tent Poetry Sideshow Barker

There are art objects that serve an of-this-world utilitarian purpose, be it drinking tea or shaping ideology. They provide us with an aesthetic and often intellectual experience. And there are art experiences, where the art object itself becomes or conjures a metaphor: the vehicle for Aristotle and Plato’s mimesis, the experience that allows us to sense the metaphysical truth. It parallels religious experience in that it is both sensory and transcendent of the senses and logic.

While the political poem or religious poem may incite our passions and rouse us to act, the art-for-art’s sake poem doesn’t elicit a response: it simply is and, through its being, allows us to experience metaphysical truth …

Click on the excerpt to read the entire article. Check our About page for a list of other Sideshow Barkers, friends of Big Tent Poetry who are generous enough to share with us their columns, interviews and reviews. There is no set schedule for these appearances; willy-nilly is a symptom of creative genius!