I wrote a rather wordy and wooly post about resonance and poetry a few weeks ago that I wasn’t happy with. I thought back to it when I came across this earlier:
Blow as deep as you want – write as deeply, fish as far down as you want, satisfy yourself first, then reader cannot fail to receive telepathic shock and meaning-excitement by same laws operating in his own human mind.
Jack Kerouac, Essentials of Spontaneous Prose
It kind of makes me want to go back and revise the original post. What I was trying to say is much clearer to me now, as a result of the above. But it also make me despair about the writing style graduate school has socialised into me, with my proclivity for “timid usually needless commas” (as Kerouac says in the same piece) and writing “arbitrarily riddled by false colons”.
Mark Carrigan 