On Tuesday, July 10, 2001, at 09:40 PM, [log in to unmask] wrote:

> 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"?

The readers I have in mind are the people who have no special training
in poetry but who nevertheless carry around and have memorized lots of
poetry because it moved them in one way or another, my carpenter,
mechanic, and toolmaker friends. My musician friends. My programmer
friends. Some of what they like is really not so good, but some is
excellent. Very little of it, outside Bible verses and a bit of
Whitman, is free verse.

"Buying" doesn't have to mean buying with money, though that is one
measure. It's really secondary to the meaning I had in mind: as in,
you're not buying my argument right now.

> I don't see that the 20C
> free verse "experiment" has "failed" (how can that be judged so soon? -

I said it's a kind of evidence (not a proof) that free verse as the
/dominant/ form of poetry has failed. I mentioned free verse several
poets I admire and would not willingly give up. But more than a hundred
years after Whitman, most people still want meter and rhyme.

> that statement seems plain untenable for example in the face of the
> immense popularity of Neruda in English, never mind Spanish

Neruda was a very great poet who wrote both free and metrical poetry.
But who is his equivalent in English last century? Only Frost might be
close. I don't know what the magic is that makes a great poet, but I
doubt it has anything to do with the choice between free verse and
metrical verse.

> - 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.

Of course -- I'd have a slightly different list which included more
metrical poets, but we share some. My point isn't about whether free
verse can be good or not, but whether free verse as the dominant poetic
form has helped to alienate Virginia Woolf's common reader from the
reading of poetry. Really, who reads poetry now?

> 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?

Poets are never experimental in my view -- that was my point: that
thinking of a poem as an experiment is a misunderstanding. Why should
poets pretend they're doing science? What on earth would it look like
if they tried?

>
> 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,

Well, there are more people, and the technology is more powerful, but no
20th century nation has managed to do what the Romans did to Carthage,
or the Jews did to the Canaanites, or the Spaniards did to the Aztec and
the Inca, or the19th Century
US did to countless Native American groups. No 20th century war lasted
a hundred years. No victors of wars before the 20th century spent larts
parts of their wealth rebuilding the nations they had defeated.


> and it seems to me odd
> to demand of poets that they ignore the consequences of that violence,
> for language, for their being.

What does this have to do with the choice between writing metrical or
free verse? If anything, in a metrical piece, or in one haunted by that
famous ghost, a poet can use disruptions of the pattern as expressive of
that violence. But I really don't either has an advantage.

> 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
>

Yes, he repudiated it. I quoted it in answer to and in agreement with
the last line of David's post. And if beauty and resonance are
inherently suspect, then being human is inherently suspect. Maybe it
is. Maybe it could be one of the tasks of poetry to redeem them.

Best

Michael