Michael wrote:

>About the only question an experimental poem can pose is "will readers buy
>this?" -- in every sense of buy, and, for the most part, they haven't. ...
Just to contradict myself, I
>think that's a kind of evidence that the
>century-long experiment in the varieties of free verse as the /dominant/
>form of poetry has failed.

I have to quarrel with this - which readers? what poetry? why is the
the only question to be posed one of "buying"? I don't see that the 20C
free verse "experiment" has "failed" (how can that be judged so soon? -
that statement seems plain untenable for example in the face of the
immense popularity of Neruda in English, never mind Spanish - and isn't
one of the precursors of modern free verse the King James Bible, one of
the best selling books of all time? etc etc etc) Myself, I could not do
without Pound or Eliot or HD or Apollinaire or Rimbaud or Joyce (Trevor
_and_ James) or Jones or MacDiarmid, my life would be poorer without
poets like Prynne or Dorn or Creeley (add whoever else) - agree with
their poetics or not, it's poetry that strikes sparks off my brain,
stretches my resources as a reader, puzzles and amuses and inspires me.
Is Emily Dickinson "experimental" with all her funny punctuation? Is
Phyllis Webb "experimental" after being corrupted by those naughty Black
Mountain poets, or does she escape the epithet? Or are poets only
"experimental" - whatever they say about their own practice - when
popular opinion (whatever that is) has judged the poetry dull?

Aside from all that - the point of a lot of experimentation has been to
make poetic language "truer" (I can't think of a better word at the
moment). The 20C has been the most unprecedentedly violent in recorded
human history, in terms of scale and technology, and it seems to me odd
to demand of poets that they ignore the consequences of that violence,
for language, for their being. Those larger forces - social, political,
economic - enter into the dynamic of all our language, quotidian and
poetic, and have been the scource of much questioning. Maybe the most
influential "experimentalist" in that line has been Paul Celan, who seems
to be translated every second day at the moment.

>I think the world both less utopian then and less desperate now than you
>describe , David. But yes.

The world is certainly less utopian - less desperate? I guess it depends
where one lives.

>The romantic lie in the brain
>Of the sensual man-in-the-street
>And the lie of Authority
>Whose buildings grope the sky:
>There is no such thing as the state
>And no one exists alone;
>Hunger allows no choice
>To the citizens or the police;
>We must love one another or die.

Beautiful resonant poetry: but this is of course the poem which Auden
famously repudiated as being "dishonest", and maybe signals the dangers
of beautiful resonance. As Edwards Mendelson says in the intro to
Auden's Selected Poems, "Still, when Auden called them 'trash which he is
ashamed to have written' he was taking them far more seriously - and
taking poetic language far more seriously - than his critics ever did."

Best

Alison