>From: Michael Snider <[log in to unmask]>
>Reply-To: Poetryetc provides a venue for a dialogue relating to poetry and
> poetics <[log in to unmask]>
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: Re: Regional Poetics?
>Date: Fri, 13 Jul 2001 17:41:13 -0400
>
>>
>>Sevanthi, as in the flower.
>
>Sorry for the typo.
>
>> And actually, I must say that I have no
>>problems remembering the diversity of the audience for poetry, since
>>those
>>poets who are often mentioned on this list--Creeley, Levertov,
>>Olson--are
>>not poets I estimate very highly.
>
>On Olson and Creeley, I agree.
>
>>But I think in this specific instance--i.e. our different observations
>>of
>>which poets are popular in America--I suspect that it's not so much a
>>question of regional poetics as, to put it delicately, other variables.
>
>Put it indelicately. Otherwise, it's hard to know who or what is being
>insulted.
>
>
>>>"New Formalism, for example, which is sometimes misleadingly portrayed
>>>as an academic literary movement, is actually of a piece with rap and
>>>cowboy poetry in recognizing the auditory nature of poetry."
>
>>And yet, rap's historic continuities are with poets who wrote in open
>>forms,
>>from The Last Poets to Linton Kwesi Johnson. Not to mention, say the
>>influence of Ntozake Shange on someone like Talib Kweli.
>
>And with James Brown and Parliament. -- however tangled the roots, the
>flower is formal.
The flower is formal, but how do you determine that this has anything to do
with "recognizing the auditory nature of poetry" when it has roots in poetry
that is a) orally-transmitted and b) in open forms?
>>Really, I can't take Dana Gioia at all seriously. In Can Poetry
>>Matter, he
>>goes on about the diminished role of poets without pausing to
>>acknowledge
>>how incredibly important poetry has been to American social movements.
>>And
>>sometimes, as in the case of Marilyn Hacker or Gwendolyn Brooks or Anne
>>Sexton or Carolyn Kizer or Thom Gunn, to my tastes rather fine poets.
>
>Again, a list not very different from my own -- and not, I suspect, very
>different from Gioia's.
My point was not that Gioia has terrible taste, it's that he's a terrible
critic. That he could enjoy the work of the aforementioned fine poets and
still write the things he wrote in Can Poetry Matter is example enough. To
put it indelicately, if I must, what he really meant is "can poetry matter
to the straight white men I work with?" A riveting question to be sure, but
his imprecision inevitably leads to analytical sloppiness.
My position, in sum: all kinds of poetry in open forms has been genuinely
popular post-T S Eliot, from Rod McKuen to Allen Ginsberg to Audre Lorde;
there have been plenty of poets who have had a recognized social position
and been read avidly outside the academy; many of these poets have worked
primarily in open forms; some of them have been quite fine poets and are
important not only to cultural history but to poetry as an art; that they
are African-Americans, women and/or homosexuals perhaps contributes to the
fact that some critics feel quite capable of writing criticism that is
premised on the fact that they don't exist.
A good recent example is Sapphire, whose American Dreams sold so well for
Serpent's Tail that it was bought by a major publisher and re-released with
a new cover. I have mixed feelings about Sapphire's work, but people are
most certainly "buying" it in all sorts of ways.
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