Hugh wrote:
>'The emotions are not skilled workers' but to paraphrase
>Ern Malley,
>I'm also not at all sure the antipodeans are skilled workers,
>though the best have great techniques. I'm surprised
>too that the above reviewer doesn't agree.
I am attempting to give up my youthful vice of generalising from the
particular.
But surely the review's introduction contra-indicates any blanket
judgement of contemporary poetry, in Australia or anywhere else:
"Craft is probably the least interesting approach to questioning poetry,
and the most susceptible to schlerotic conservatisms. It raises the
question of what makes a "good" poem, and can be so easily hijacked to
formulaic rules. And this abuts the uneasy question of what constitutes
current poetic practice, and how to evaluate it in the absence of
"standards".
One response to this dilemma has been to abandon all discrimination in
favour of a weakly promisicuous "supportiveness", which strikes me as
tantamount to an abandonment of poetry itself. But to reject this
approach raises the question of how to respond to a poem at all. Poems
matter to me because of their beauty, intelligence, passion, vitality,
excitement: but how do you measure the measureless, or define the
indefinable? And in any case, is it at all desirable to do so?
Perhaps ultimately these questions can only be passed over in silence,
although they seem germane to the art of poetry, and especially pressing
in discussing the current diversities of poetic practice.
When poetry abandoned metrical devices and measures almost a century ago,
it laid bare the question of what constitutes a prosody. The most
interesting contemporary poetry meets this question head on in a myriad
of ways, ranging from a deeply questioning restoration of formalities to
a more thorough smashing of language itself. But in many places a
dreadful orthodoxy has rushed in to fill the vacuum left by conventional
rhyme: a free verse which is, in fact, anything but free or verse."
I also meekly point out that the par you quote only refers to one of the
books. I might as well quote the whole paragraph, to show more clearly
what I meant by "failure" (if anyone's interested in arguing with the
whole review, it's easily available).
"Walker claims: "Sentimentality / is what we need". No: _feeling_ is
what we need. Sentimentality, as Wallace Stevens remarked, is always a
failure of feeling.
But the real problem is not the failing. We all fail: the best most.
The problem is the complacencies behind these poems, the egocentric
incuriosities of their poetics. Failure is not possible, because so
little is being attempted."
Alison
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