Time for Poetry
Giorgio Agamben
In The Time That Remains Agamben writes:
The poem is therefore an organism or a temporal machine that, from the very start, strains toward its end. A kind of eschatology occurs within the poem itself. But for the more or less brief time that the poem lasts, it has a specific and unmistakable temporality. It has its own time.
Makes sense to me, I think.
Lately I’ve been having a hard time keeping up with poetry, because I’m not finding my way into its timeframe.
What are some poems that require no time? This Michael Earl Craig poem, “Nightnurse,” for me, does. Not. Does not require time.
This night nurse is different.She walks into my room and does not turn the light on.She thinks I am sleeping.I have just barely opened my left eye,am looking through the slightest slit,as moonlight exposes the roomfor what it really is — a collectionof surfaces; lines and planes, mostly.
Adam Robinson lives in Atlanta and runs Publishing Genius Press. He is the author of two poetry collections, Adam Robison and Other Poems and Say Poem.
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- New Pantscast feat. Bud Smith 🙂 - April 27, 2018
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