Much like zinc
This writing needs to happen daily if it's to have the healthful benefits I know it can have.
I realize that I dismissed Language Poetry too much out of hand last post. Having slept on it I figured that I'd log on and point to some of its virtues, but it's not that kind of noontime; I've been frustrated with most of the poetry I've been reading this morning, which is the first half of James Merrill's Late Settings, and I don't want to redeem his or Language or any poetry that doesn't impel me toward a new realization of some fact, insight, or emotion.
A poet submitted to the ______ Review recently and his work made it into the special committee discussion. This was a particular kind of voice at work in those poems, with a Whitmanic scope in terms of subject and syntax, and the bald confidence that that voice possessed, the trust that the reader would be not only be able to follow the syntax, associative leaps, and turns of diction into humor and pathos by turns, but that to so follow would be a simple, natural matter, and would bestow upon the reader weighty heaps of sadness and pleasure, etc. Death was a common theme, also sandcastles, logos on the trucks of landscaping companies, the sounds black holes make, you get the idea. But for some reason none of the poems worked, none won champions or defenders, none worked.
I believe I know why: at the most practical level, the exuberance of these poems as they ranged hither and thither - with much verve and elan at times - were never leavened with recurrent images, revisited ideas, developed meaning. Although Auerbach's theory of "figura" brooks I think too much devotion in certain narrative-minded writing, in which some primary image accumulates additional and sub-meanings throughout the anecdote-poem until a final reconstitution of that image completes the poem's narrative and imagistic meaning, I also think that a functional version of the expansive / associational poetry I describe and pull for must employ some bastard of figura so to rein in the poem. Such a poem's going to riff on this and that and a half-dozen other things, in dialect here and in egghead jargon there, administering teeming doses of enjoyment along the way, but it will, it must, it has to cycle back if only occasionally on the image, idea, or sentiment that is the poem's raison d'etre.
Images, ideas, and sentiments, however, are not the same. More on this later today, let's hope. I may catch a matinee.
I realize that I dismissed Language Poetry too much out of hand last post. Having slept on it I figured that I'd log on and point to some of its virtues, but it's not that kind of noontime; I've been frustrated with most of the poetry I've been reading this morning, which is the first half of James Merrill's Late Settings, and I don't want to redeem his or Language or any poetry that doesn't impel me toward a new realization of some fact, insight, or emotion.
A poet submitted to the ______ Review recently and his work made it into the special committee discussion. This was a particular kind of voice at work in those poems, with a Whitmanic scope in terms of subject and syntax, and the bald confidence that that voice possessed, the trust that the reader would be not only be able to follow the syntax, associative leaps, and turns of diction into humor and pathos by turns, but that to so follow would be a simple, natural matter, and would bestow upon the reader weighty heaps of sadness and pleasure, etc. Death was a common theme, also sandcastles, logos on the trucks of landscaping companies, the sounds black holes make, you get the idea. But for some reason none of the poems worked, none won champions or defenders, none worked.
I believe I know why: at the most practical level, the exuberance of these poems as they ranged hither and thither - with much verve and elan at times - were never leavened with recurrent images, revisited ideas, developed meaning. Although Auerbach's theory of "figura" brooks I think too much devotion in certain narrative-minded writing, in which some primary image accumulates additional and sub-meanings throughout the anecdote-poem until a final reconstitution of that image completes the poem's narrative and imagistic meaning, I also think that a functional version of the expansive / associational poetry I describe and pull for must employ some bastard of figura so to rein in the poem. Such a poem's going to riff on this and that and a half-dozen other things, in dialect here and in egghead jargon there, administering teeming doses of enjoyment along the way, but it will, it must, it has to cycle back if only occasionally on the image, idea, or sentiment that is the poem's raison d'etre.
Images, ideas, and sentiments, however, are not the same. More on this later today, let's hope. I may catch a matinee.
posted by Wil at
11:58 AM
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