Showing posts with label white noise. Show all posts
Showing posts with label white noise. Show all posts

2.17.2016

echo chamber

That is, in poetry more than in any other verbal genre, readers bring an expectation that not only do all the elements matter down to the comma and the white space at the end of a line and between or within stanzas, but that each of those elements, no matter how widely arrayed, may tug at other elements and condition the whole. The poem is an echo chamber where we listen to the reverberations that otherwise dissolve into the white noise of anxiety.

—Lee Upton, “Poetry, Defined. Briefly.” Swallowing the Sea: On Writing & Ambition Boredom Purity & Secrecy (Tupelo Press, 2012)

5.05.2007

not silence but white noise

Some have called the empty space around the words a kind of silence. But it's the white noise of all the words trying to enter the poem, words clamoring to be heard, text struggling to make itself visible.