For me, these two poems are too yoked to an *opinion* to be successful. If
the reader disagrees with the opinion, what is left? A poem has to be more
than a statement of what its author thinks and feels, otherwise we could all
be happy talking and emailing each other, and not bother with poems at all.
And I would feel exactly the same if your poems were telling me that animal
experimentation is wrong, or that Holland deserved to be in the final of
Euro 2000, or that contributors to email lists should or should not use
their real names. What matters is not what the poem *says* but what it
*does* - which is independent of whether you agree with it.
Best wishes,
Matthew Francis
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Visit my website at http://www.7greenhill.freeserve.co.uk
-----Original Message-----
From: gb savage <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>
Date: 13 July 2000 01:13
Subject: poets who eschew clarity
>Roddy invited comment on the "laziness and bad manners" of poets who eschew
>clarity. I'd say it was more a fault of ego than of laziness and bad
>manners.
>
>Here are two of mine on the subject...
>
>
>The miserly poet
>
>The poet who declaims his opinions
>in obscurely wrought puzzles
>leaves me cold.
>Mental games of cleverness
>proclaim hollow virtuosity
>and touch nothing.
>
>Meanings buried in too-clever references
>and elliptical allusions are still-born,
>leaving only signposts to nowhere.
>
>If I struggle to decode the signs,
>will there be that flash of insight
>to reveal a new world?
>I puzzle and probe this tortured language,
>teasing out its meaning --
>but find only opinon,
>dressed in obscure intellectualism.
>
>Neither hand nor heart was engaged
>in this clever mind game.
>These shuttered phrases are ungenerous
>give little away.
>Tight and miserly,
>they withold meaning.
>
>This self-seeking game would matter little
>if the poet was not
>held up as a National Treasure.
>
>
>---------------------------------------------------------------------------
-
>----
>
>
>
>
>Obscurity
>
>Obscurity in a poet
>is a cardinal sin
>as is stating the obvious.
>Poets live dangerously -
>poised between
>the obvious and the obscure.
>
>
>........................
>
>Gillian Savage
>
>
>
>
>
>
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