Thanks for this Kent.
I attempted to juxtapose the WCW / Frost poetics to do quite the same
thing. I found a copy of Davenport's Geography of the Imagination about a
month ago; I purchased it in particular to take at look at his Olson essay
on allusions in "Kingfishers".
This very strange encrustation of poetic camps is one that in some ways has
been going on for nearly 100 years in the US, and I wonder if it really is
even necessary to be continued. I think not. Sometime in January, I spoke
with a poet who told me that in 1950 one of the first questions he would
ask folks would be "which side are you on--TSE or WCW?" He said that if you
said TSE, he would think about punching you out -- depending on how many
drinks he had put away. Nonetheless, I do not think that we need to fight
over great-grandparents anymore. I think we can see them all as who they
were then and who they are to us now.
Having Lind come to Poetryetc. would be interesting, but I wonder if he
would entertain such an idea.
--Ak
At 09:59 AM 7/9/01, you wrote:
>Robin asked aobut Stevens' prosody and Michael mentioned that Robert Mezey
>had done an analysis of Sunday Morning. IN an essay I wrote for a book on
>the "Objectivist" poet Carl Rakosi, I discuss Stevens quite extensively in
>regard to the dominant patterns of his meter, comparing his prosody to that
>of Rakosi (a very rigorous formalist, who would no doubt be regarded by
>Lind, et.al. as a "free-verser"), and then making some speculations as to
>how these formal expressions enact fundamentally different epistemological
>stances. Frank Parker had mentioned this essay a while back, and you can
>find brief selections from it at the Academy of American Poets site under
>the Rakosi entry (I think that's where it is). Otherwise, it's in CArl
>Rakosi: Man and Poet, ed. by Michael Heller, published by National Poetry
>Foundation. On Zukofsky, also mentioned by Robin, I have written (might as
>well keep going here) an essay on his extraordinary and final 80 Flowers
>(also discussed by Davenport in Geography of the Imagination, which someoen
>mentioned), arguing that the form of these poems derives from the 8th
>century lu-shih, whose prosodic trapeze apparatus makes most Western forms
>seem like patty-cakes. I wonder how many of the "Expansionists" have
>attempted dialogue with classical Chinese prosody?
>
>Kent
>
>
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