Thanks to Roddy for explaining what he meant and 'soz' from me for not
reading the original post carefully enough.
I'd still like to pursue this further though - both Roddy's post and Peter
Howard's swipe at poets who might think they're being innovative but no
longer are.
Both areas still strike me as curious. I can partially understand Roddy's
impatience with people dressing up conventional work with stylistic pointers
in an opposite direction - how about naming some poets? But: there's another
view that says surely it's a matter of choice determined by the
circumstances/subject of the poem. This is my own experience. Sometimes
starting every line with a capital letter looks stupid but at others it
seems just right, etc. And we still seem to be erecting a list of shoulds
and shouldn'ts.
Going on to Peter Howard's point: if what he says is true then what is his
response to all the poets who are still writing as if Ashbery, postmodernism
etc never happened? Are they aping as opposed to being traditional? Are you
going to make the same charge against the poet writing a sonnet and/or using
the pentameter: well, of course, they're not actually working in a
particular poetical tradition they're just aping?
My point here is a double one: (a) I still detect unjustified antipathy
towards innovators and (b) aren't all the things that Peter calls 'aping'
actually on one level stylistic locators i.e. a way of signalling where the
poet thinks he or she belongs? Just like writing a sonnet in fact. For
example, I've always thought that John Hartley Williams's use of the
ampersand, shortened forms like 'cd' and 'wd', strange enjambments was
precisely that i.e. a playful way of signalling that he's skewed to the
mainstream in important ways but is not a full-blown non-mainstream writer.
But again I'd like to see discussion of poets with examples. Otherwise this
thread is just a case of people waving placards at each other.
cheers
David
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