After some vile weather last night, the sun is out in Aldeburgh and there are egrets on the wing across the marshes between here and Thorpeness, the next village along the coast. I'll be reporting on the day's events and sights later however back to yesterday evening...
One of the other sessions I caught was the exchange between Peter Blegvad and Albert Goldbarth on the role of time in poetry. Was it 'the grand metaphysical imponderable' for poets. Discussing such issues as whether time was cyclical or flowed like an arrow – citing poets and philosophies from around the world – Goldbarth and Blegvad treated the audience to a fast and furious foray into one of the key issues poets have struggled with throughout the ages. Although if you accept the argument that time is cyclical, then we'll all be revisiting this topic at another festival in a few millennia's time.
After several audience participation questions – one of which revealed that the younger half of the audience felt they had all the time in the world, whereas it was tempus fugit – and grab every pleasure while you still can, preferably right this instant – for the older half, the conversation moved off into the realms of Albert Golbarth's 'memory car' mnemonic for helping to stimulate memory. Memory car??? If you want to remember fish, think of the fins of a 1950s era Cadillac.
We were also treated to such nuggets from Blegvad as time comprising "a beginning, muddle and end," "imagination is like a muscle, it will increase with exercise" and "time is abolished by a god metaphor". Goldman countered with the idea that "when you open a book, the author lives again" before going to explain that the old 4-frame cartoon strip has the same structure as a sonnet or setsina. This final point may seem a little obscure but as both Blegvad and Goldbarth explained – before time's arrow ran its course and the session ended – both poetry and comic strips can only provide the framework, leaving it to the reader to fill in the gaps, whereas with short stories and novels, the author does most of this for you. As Blegvad summed it up "poets leave everything out – they telescope narrative time – and leave you to write the story in your head."
All in all, a fascinating and thought provoking session – if only there had been more time to explore it further, which is where we came in...
