Very much with JK on this one! Of all the poets writing in
English today, there are to my mind three who approach genius:
Prynne, Ashbery, and Muldoon--whose versatility (which may be
similar to what JK means by his "great linguistic dexterity")
even exceeds that of the first two (IMHO)--and I'm just thinking
of the breathtaking technical and emotional range from the
relatively lyric-length "Incantata" or long poem "Yarrow" to
such formally distinct and diverse works as the anti-sonnet
"Holy Thursday," the "Hopewell Haiku," and "Sleeve Notes."
I've learned from everything I've ever read by Muldoon,
including "Holy Thursday" (read for the first time last
night), which impressed me on a number of fronts, one being
the way the sonnet form goes south in parallel with the
unraveling relationship of the lovers/diners, while also being
enacted as a sort of poetic anachronism juxtaposed to religion
(or at least Catholicism) through the waiter's dumbshow at/with
"the table iteself" of the priest's gestures and actions at the
alter during the part of the Mass that follows Communion, which
itself reenacts the Last Supper of Holy Thursday each and every
time the Mass is celebrated--a ritual celebration of betrayal
with obvious implications for the dining and soon to be divided
pair of lovers. You can see the intricated process of unraveling
down to the poem's culminating "absence" in the rhymes alone,
beginning with the standard hard rhyme of "late" and "plate"
that yields to the oddly off-rhyming "up" and "soup" in the
very first quatrain, followed by the faint slant rhymes of
"but one" with "between" and "over" with "or were" in the
second quatrain. Then everything comes undone even as it's
being reaffirmed and reinforced in the last stanza.
(And, Douglas, I think if you read "Hopewell Haiku" in HAY,
you'd find an elegy for a beloved cat, among other things!)
Candice
><[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>> Has he ever
>> written a good poem in his life?
John Kinsella wrote:
>YES!! most of them are good, from my pov. i reckon he's one of the most
>interesting poets around. his recent volume Hay shows great linguistic
>dexterity. maybe it's the tensions within his version of the pastoral, the
>shifts from the 'comic' to the 'serious', his language-play, subterfuges re
>pop culture and 'tradition'... and so on... i'm not going to expand,though
>an essay will appear some time down the track...
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