Archive for the ‘poetry’ Category
The endless question.
I took this blog’s title from Samuel Beckett’s final poem.
While I generally dislike interpreting texts biographically (Roland Barthes’s “Death of an Author” successfully seduced me several years ago), there’s something to be said for knowing that this is Beckett’s deathbed work. This profound question, that of course within the text is never posed as a question, that works on multiple levels (“what” is the word, what is the word?) seems to me to be the major problematic within the study of literature. Beckett repeats it, over and over again; we all repeat it. It’s the question we ask in every critique and essay, and the statement we always return to: the word that matters.
Of course, we could make a case for “how is the word”, too.
The full poem is underneath the cut.
Read the rest of this entry »
