"Well, Candice, you know me, always the good
empiricist"
You're not a good empiricist at all, cos you seem to
be unaware of the essential prerequisite for decent
empirical work - an acknowledgement of the
theory-dependence of observation. You see your own
observation-guiding theory before you see bad centred
poetry...I suspect that a large part of your theory is
a collection of petit-bourgeois hangups generalised
into aesthetic hangups, the sort of hangups the great
Stevens would have left at the office. Tell me, if I
sent you this piece of poetry would your impeccable
aesthetic radar have worked impeccably:
Summer is in bones.
Cock-robin's at Caracas.
Make o, make o, make o,
Oto - otu - bre.
Would you revere that if it were not in Stevens' hand
somewhere?
When you present your aesthetic prejudices in
pseudo-nativist jargon - the sort of 'hey, I'm a
connoisseur, I know what's good'kinda thing - you
perpetuate a division that ensures the alienation of
the consumers of poetry from the producers and
marketers of poetry, and contributes to the further
marginalisation of an already marginalised wing of
human culture. I would advise you to drop the smug
tone and do some hard thinking about your own
prejudices, if you want to be anything more than an
archivist for a poet who does not demand archivists...
Scott Hamilton
PS Since we're sort of talking about Stevens here, can
I ask people to name their favourite Stevens poem? I
have always wondered if the famous anthology pieces
are as beloved as people make out. I nominate a
slightly more 'obscure' thing, 'Like Decorations In A
Nigger Cemetery'from Ideas of Order. Any seconders?
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Subject: Re: Roddy Lumsden Re-Activates The Movement -
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Well, Candice, you know me, always the good
empiricist. My observation was based
on ten years of opening the mail that comes to me as
poetry editor of The Wallace
Stevens Journal. So perhaps I should have said more
clearly what I meant, to wit:
"when I open a poetry submission & find
center-justified text, I know for a fact
.. . ." I haven't been wrong yet, though I have myself
written center-justified
poems (for I also had my reasons). I'm glad you sent
your poem to Kinsella,
though, not to me, thus keeping my record intact.
Anyway, as a good empiricist, I
intended to make no claims that couldn't be supported
by experience & I don't
think I did.
Mr. Ed.
[log in to unmask] wrote:
> Boy, are these words going to come back to haunt you
boys
> (Mr. Eds.?) with a vengeance! And I hope at least
one of you
> already regrets expressing such an unquantifiable
notion of
> personal taste as this one in such terms as "I know
for a
> fact" (come on).
>
> And that's without even getting into the (to me,
obnoxious)
> condescension of your joint and separate tone.
>
> Whew,
>
> Candice
>
> P.S. Without making any claims for the greatness of
my own poetry,
> I'll add only that I've been writing and publishing
it for over 30
=====
"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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