"a desperate wishing that I might somehow live inside the poem"

by J J Cohen

Check out this beautiful post at The Rebel Letter. The Lettriste quotes Seamus Heaney's "A Norman Simile" from "Ten Glosses": "To be marvellously yourself like the river water / Gerald of Wales says runs in Arklow harbor / Even at high tide when you'd expect salt water." She then writes:

once I learned how to read, all the other chaos and grief--my grandmother's sudden death, my infant brother's surgery and subsequent illnesses and accidents, a robbery, my parents' terrible consequent battles and ultimate separation--erupting in my family was somehow made more bearable ... I know that my wish to live inside literature is also a desire to prolong sensual, aesthetic pleasure. For me the wish is often associated sound, rhyme, repetition, rhythm. As in Heaney's "water-harbor-water" half-rhyme repetition. But it's also a wish that goes beyond mere pleasure. I think it's also about wanting to be alone with language, to be consoled by language, to simply sit there and listen. It's a privileging of solitude, of private conversation.

Read the post in its entirety.