Kent writes:
<<the vast majority of poets today, even those who have trained their voices
to become supple and flexible instruments, insist on "playing themselves."
And it's this scripted role (ah, the real and arrased script of ideology, as
Dana Gioia
said-- no, just kidding) that underwrites the "common-sense" conflation of
"voice" with normative, legal poetic identity.>>
True. What is even worse is that the conception of the self is so often
impoverished. This is why so many of those poems about grandma's tablecloth
you find in the lit mags seem to bore even themselves. (Not that a poet with
a subtle understanding of self couldn't write a good poem about grandma's
tablecloth.)
jd
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