"How odd to equate clarity in poetry with naturalism
in art.
As I don't support your proposition, I must dismiss
your conclusions as most
peculiar."
Not as peculiar as the idea that we should junk over a
century's worth of wonderful poets who fail your
'clarity' test. Bye bye Rimbaud, the Eliot of the
Wasteland, Reverdy, Jacob, Stevens, the later Pound,
Trakl... geez, I haven't even gotten past Modernism
yet, and it's already like burning down the library
(or was it a newspaper stand?) in Alexandria!
My 'proposition' comes from John Ashbery, another of
your victims. He said something like "Nobody hassles
Piccasso anymore for putting a nose in the middle of a
forehead, but I get in trouble for doing the
equivalent thing in literature" (this was a few
decades back, when the Larkin rearguard was more
populous and young enough to engage in tactical
manoeuvres).
Anyway, I'd like to write up a poem by Clark Coolidge,
in the hope of clarifying this darn clarity thing. To
me, this is one of the clearest poems ever written.
Can any of the Larkinites disagree?
OK, it's not about something in the way that King Lear
is mostly about something, but each word is clear as a
bell. It's clear in the way that Mondrian's best
abstract compositions are clear, clear as an azure
sky...
ounce code orange
ah
the
ohm
trilobite trilobites
Clear enough for you?
Cheers
Scott
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Subject: RE: clarity, or obsolete figurative art?
From: "gb savage" <[log in to unmask]>
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How odd to equate clarity in poetry with naturalism in
art.
As I don't support your proposition, I must dismiss
your conclusions as most
peculiar.
Gillian
-----Original Message-----
From: [log in to unmask]
[mailto:[log in to unmask]]On Behalf Of
Scott Hamilton
Sent: Thursday, 13 July 2000 7:54
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: clarity, or obsolete figurative art?
=====
"Why is it not possible for me to doubt that I have never been on the moon? And how
could I try to doubt it? First and foremost, the supposition that perhaps I have
been there would strike me as idle. Nothing would follow from it, nothing be
explained by it. It would not tie in with anything in my life... Philosophical
problems occur when language goes on holiday. We must not separate ideas from life,
we must not be misled by the appearances of sentences: we must investigate the
application of words in individual language-games" - Ludwig Wittgenstein
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