In a message dated 8/2/01 7:16:34 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
[log in to unmask] writes:
> A question / reservation to raise about Finnegan's words on Jorie Graham's
> role at Iowa. Did you do the MFA yourself, Finnegan? did anyone else here?
> because I'd be interested to know what people think about langpo techniques
> being 'adapted' to mainstream poetics. I seem to remember something like
> this being discussed _somewhere_ a while back and someone told a story
> about Lyn Hejinian getting quite upset at langpo techniques being co-opted,
> saying something like 'language poetry isn't a _style_.' What do people
> think about this? Can you _responsibly_ adapt the techniques of a school
> without engaging with the political and social implications of the poetic
> as a way of life, as a way of having poetry as part of a living continuum
> rather than as a professionalised, specialised activity? if not, is there
> an argument for abandoning poetry writing programs in favour of programs
> that actively encourage people to develope wider notions of poetics and
> approach?
>
Malcolm,
The MFA program is a fixture of the landscape in contermporary poetry
in the US. But I'm afraid when it comes to poetry I'm an autodidact. (I've
had a few mentor's, however. Most notably, Jack Gilbert, an American
poet who should/would be more well known...except that he's not part
of the careerist system. See The Great Fires, or Monolithos, both published
by Knopf.)
Once a "poetics" becomes a poem it becomes art/artifice. One can
make theoretical, social & political claims for the underpinnings of
his/her poem (or slather them on to the "product" after the fact)....but
as art the poem is a set of textual techniques, a schema of words.
This can said of the poem of "unified voice" and the poem of "indeterminacy."
And techniques can be abstracted from the work and employed by
other poets who may be only vaguely sympathic to the program of the
innovating/originating author(s).
Equally romantic notions: "My art speaks from my soul." &
"My art is a socio-political act." The made thing prevails through time.
Lyn Hejinian recently won a fellowship from the Academy of American
Poets. Susan Howe & Nathanial Mackey are Academy chancellors.
(How 'bout that for avantgardist title?) The political & social mission
of the work aside, this fixes Hejinian & other language poets in the
panoply of the notable "makers" of contemporary poetry.
Finnegan
PS: Listening to a wonderful CD set of Norton lectures called the
"Craft of Verse" by J. L. Borges last nite: He offhandedly quoted
a Goethe character: "Think of me what you like; but I am a contemporary."
|