1. The Dana Gioia articles (Can Poetry Matter?-- and the follow-up, Hearing
from Poetry's Audience -- http://www.jough.com/poetry/essays/poetaud.shtml):
need defending along the lines of Tim Allen's posting: 'What he gives as an
'explanation' for the poor state of poetry is limited to one field (the
appropriation of the art to the US universities at the expense of any wider
audience) and one country, because what he says certainly does not apply in
UK. That alone points to his focus as being weak but nevertheless it does
provide a partial view. That, combined with the mostly negative view of the
Universities' part, makes the article biased but, looking at it neutrally,
isn't there a degree of truth there that needs serious addressing?'
Keith Tuma's interview with Peter Riley
(http://www.jacket.zip.com.au/jacket11/riley-iv-by-tuma.html) contains these
two excerpts:
'Then there's the prose opening «Lines on the Liver», which is full of
provocative claims about the nature of the self and desire, industrial
"encrustation" and "marine fossil energy in suspension which has men mining
in their sleep," and so on. The prose there, as also to a lesser extent in
the letters to Baker, sometimes takes the form of rhetorical questions -
e.g., "Isn't the lack which drives us into work then something from a
distance, if not distance itself?" The prose is meditative but it is also
propositional - much the same might be said of the poems - though the
questions do suggest a direct turn to a real or supposed reader.'
-- and:
' "The Creative Moment of the Poem" doesn't pull many punches. Your claims
about the relationship of poet and reader to the poem lead you to attack
poetry which proposes an "en bloc transfer of substance" between poet and
reader, that so-called "mainstream" poetry which in its "refined versions"
is given to "anecdote and self-distancing" and "always implies the immediate
return of the small-scale recognition which is all it offers." You also
reject a poetry of "suspended suggestion, wilful fragmentation, word-salad
and other negations of continuity" offered "in the name of
reader-engagement," arguing that such poetry "abnegates the poet's duty to
truth and leaves the reader hopelessly alone." '
-- So, Poetryetc, one way or another a lot of us talk about things called
selves which are not simple, and about the deeply meditated products of
selves which are poems, and which are to be 'understood' only after much
exposure to the art. In spite of the poetry fests and slams and other
performances, the audience is minuscule: so is the audience for scientific
papers. This is not to say that poets must be academics (though it turns
out to be the case that many are).
2. I don't know how best to defend Peter Porter. There is the easy and
amusing Porter of 'Your Attention Please' and 'A Consumer's Report', and the
more characteristically allusive, elusive and fruity Porter of 'Preaching to
the Converted' and 'The Great Poet Comes Here in Winter'. I suppose you
have to like his wit. One way is to for someone to offer a smallish
critique and for others to add. Do discussions like that take place here?
Alan Marshfield.
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