Compactification

Randall, Fainlight, Sedakova

pp. 181-204

in: Emily Rolfe Grosholz, Great circles, Berlin, Springer, 2018

Abstract

In every poem, there is a tug of war between the poem's temporality, its successiveness as the reader moves from line to line, from stanza to stanza, and its spatiality, its shape, which becomes a figure for the transcendence of time and evanescence, a figure for the way in which things (especially people, and works of art!) endure in our hearts and minds. Poets who do not love succession often employ various strategies to escape from the linearity and rush of time, and in particular from the linearity of narrative (driving us from beginning to middle to end) and argument (insisting on the necessary inference from premise, premise, premise… to conclusion). They employ repetition in a certain way, and they are especially fond of circles and rings, the result of various kinds of compactification, as the mathematicians call it.