To Tod: Again, "Fred" is fine. - It's difficult to answer a question of
the form "How can you think X = Y" when one has been discussing exactly
that proposition - or discussing Y in such a way that its application to
X should (or so one feels) be clear. To criticize Graham fairly I would
have to quote her work. Since I don't have the time I'll retire the
field, fully admitting that I have not proved a case. Three points,
however. 1) JG's stylistic mechanisms include setting down blanks or
dashes in place of words, and sequences of variations on a phrase that
remain, and are stated to be, insufficient. I don't feel that these
mechanisms serve "silence," or demonstrate a meaning that language
cannot grasp. To me they are, as it were, noisy; they "raise a dust,
then complain they cannot see." 2) To assume that one's subtlest
velleities are worth endless lines - that to summarize or approximate
would be self-betrayal - strikes me as narcissistic. I think some poets
are popular because they act out (at least on paper) a self-absorption -
or a self-destructiveness or infantilism - that the reader shares, but
which the reader must, in daily life, suppress. It seems odd to pair
Graham with Bukowski, but I think one may fairly do so - and not to
Bukowski's disadvantage: his implicit deal with the reader (your
forgiveness, my exhibitionism) is more honest. 3) A great sensibility
can ignore history, or assume that everything crucial in history
happens, or is reflected, in the poet's soul. Simply to make this
assumption, however, does not make one great. To equate a massacre,
war, or cold war with a disastrous love affair, or with a mood resulting
from it - and to make the mood, rather than the massacre, the subject of
the poem - strike me as narcissistic. It is a narcissism sanctioned by,
and evident throughout, contemporary culture; and I think the role of
poetry should not be to replicate but to attack it.
Re your second paragraph: it's quite possible that I've allowed the word
"narrative" to mean too much, and hence too little, in recent postings.
So I will say that by "narrative" I mean three things: plot (however
simple), characters (however few), and beginning, middle, and end. T.
Bahti's claim that, looked at a certain way, every good poem is a
narrative was useful to me personally, since around the time I read it I
was planning to try my hand (for the first time) at the lyric. Yet this
claim is a metaphor, and all metaphors are questionable.
To D. Barbour: My example of a long narrative poem that "doesn't push
enough at its chosen conventions" - if by "push at" you mean detach
oneself from, criticize, transcend - is Walcott's Omeros. I greatly
like many of W's shorter poems, such as his elegy to The Mighty Sparrow,
but I found Omeros unreadable. Its plot conventions are those of the
high-modernist novel, wherein time may be disordered, character
splintered, discursive levels in conflict, and the ordering myth a
received, rather than an invented, structure. Its stylistic conventions
are those of (Walcott's) lyric poetry, where lush metaphor is an
unquestioned good. I often recommend this book as an example of what
not to do in modern epic.
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