----- Original Message -----
From: pain <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: 13 March 2000 00:11
Subject: Reading poetry in the past and in the present
| I would like to ask listers if we apply different standards with regards
to
| reading of mainstream/popular poets of the past/present and
| avant-garde/experimental poetry.
Of course, not. How silly that would be. Presented with a number of poems
based on different aesthetic and or procedural principles, using different
techniques and attempting to achieve different effects, clearly the only
thing to do will be to apply the same standards to them all. How else
shall we judge? & we must judge, you know. But perhaps we could demand of
poems that they conduct self-assessment. Go with the times. "I'm sorry, I
can't publish this; you haven't built in any method of assessment.
Double standards have been available for years; and it clearly hasn't been
enough. What's good enough for Dresden and the economy should work for art.
*More of what is otherwise the same. Growth! At this day and age, as we
enter the twenty first century, kicking the screaming, let us have, at the
end of the day, quadruple standards. Let us face it!
|The question of evaluation, criteria etc seems integral
|to answering these questions.
Perhaps, but it's not particularly applicable to any question that interests
me greatly... Playing safe... applying the mind set appropriate to a safe
poem to a suspect poem is playing safe. Institutionalise it if it won't
behave.
L
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