Norma ColeIN THE TIME OF PROSODYIn the time of imagination, prosody becomes the reference system, the set of locating coordinates. In the time of prosody, imagination becomes the realm. In the imagination of time, prosody is memory. In a poetry of thought, memory, time and imagination, the tracking impulses are multifarious. Mrs. Carlyle's response to Robert Browning's "Sordello," that she could not make out whether Sordello was a man, a city or a book, recast into assertion rather than skepticism, or at least into speculation, becomes strikingly apt as description of a particular strand of contemporary poetry. In the imagination of this time and place, prosody becomes the foundations, bearing memory and history and experience in its continuity and breath, breath and measure. "she forgets to leave off reading" One writes in order to leave off reading. One writes it down in order to read. One writes it down variously as it is variously true, true in the sense of coexisting, present even when absent in the act of being recalled or remembered. "I find phrases in your poems and letters that are so very much enough in themselves" (Alec Finlay, Morning Star Publications, Edinburgh, letter 26 January 1994) But the phrases that strike Alec Finlay, reader/editor, as being apt for his Folio project do not exist, do not come into existence in a vacuum, on their own. They are points along the way, and they are single threads that gain their strength through having been spun and woven in, with other threads, to create a pattern (a woman, a city, a book) a texture, a text. That is their logic, that is their story, for they are part of a story, they belong to it; they long for it if they are separated out. And this longing can have value in itself, is discovery, or might be. Introductory Remarks, *"In the time of Prosody" is excerpted from Norma Cole's book To Be At Music: Essays and Talks (Omnidawn Publishing, 2010).
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