Alison,either I overstated things or you overread them --
On Wednesday, July 11, 2001, at 02:02 AM, [log in to unmask] wrote:

> Henry wrote:
>
>> I think it's important how this debate is framed. Do you really want
>> to set
>> up a binary between free verse poets and formal metrical poets?
>
> Certainly not. I was screaming kicking and biting my way out of it - no
> doubt getting more tangled in the nets as I went - as a practitioner and
> reader of both. The most interesting poets - from Donne to Hopkins to
> Pound to Prynne - have always been innovators,

I almost agree with you here, Alison. But innovation is not always
technical innovation, and the most interesting poets are not always the
best poets. Richard Wilbur is, I think, about as good as we've got
right now, and he's not much of an innovator. For that matter, neither
was Levertov, not for the last 30 years of her career. But she was
still a wonderful poet.

> and Michael's implicit
> suggestion that innovation is somehow bad because it alienates the
> "common man" is for me deeply problematic.

Innovation in response to a problem which needs to be solved -- and that
problem can be the universal one of finding one's own voice -- is
necessary and good. What I dispute is that it has anything to do with
progress, and I think that mistaken notion leads to change where none is
necessary, and to further extensions of ideas and techniques that
haven't served poetry or readers of poetry. Sometimes a decision to step
back can be an innovation. The first rule of holes: When you're in
one, stop digging.

> I actually agree with Michael
> on the word "experimental", if not the practice/s which this word
> covers;
> what I cavil at is the idea that poetry's quality or "success" can be
> seriously measured by its popularity. Not even Frost bought that one.

I don't either. What I claim is that poetry, even the most difficult
and technically audacious poetry (some of which is metrical verse and
some not), would have a wider audience if most serious poets took
ordinary readers' expectations seriously, and I think those some of
those expectations are formal ones. Some writers are genuinely ahead of
their time. Some writers cannot say their say without a necessary
difficulty in their work. But who will read them if most of the reading
public has decided that poetry is a game poets play with other poets?

<your horrors and mine both snipped. Will it get us anywhere arguing
about when and where the worst people lived?>

> What this has to do with poetry - well, as I said in my earlier posting,
> the awarenesses of these kinds of violence and the effects they have on
> language, questionings of poetry's (lost) role as legitimator of the
> State (from the Aeneid on) and also its place as a locus of
> linguistic/political dissent and critique and so on

That's just it -- poetry can serve the state, the individual, the tribe,
the king, the working single mother, the baby born with AIDS, the
church, carpenters, whoever, or no one. What you use it for can be a
political, and whether you're interested in the "use" of poetry can be
political, but the choice of technique is not political. You can be as
innovative, or as traditional, in the service of tyranny as you can in
the service of deep ecology or of sensual pleasure or of just amusing
yourself.

> have powered much
> "experimental" literature since WW2. One reason I find postwar German
> literature so interesting. The places I find these kinds of
> questionings
> in comtemporary poems are for the most part in "innovative" poetry. I
> don't want to (nor can I) write like Prynne, there is no way he's ever
> going to be recited by your average carpenter, but how does that make
> his
> work less valuable?

Absolutely not. But if the average carpenter were more likely to look
to recent and contemporary poetry in the first place, wouldn't that make
such recitations more likely?

>> 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.
>
> Being human is definitely inherently suspect! "What a piece of work is
> man..." - to quote someone who could make lines that were resonant and
> beautiful, but ambiguous and complex enough to avoid the dishonesty
> Auden
> complained of. And thus, to my mind, the more beautiful.
>
> I'm not sure that poetry can redeem anything. That doesn't mean that I
> don't believe it's incredibly important.

Yes. So important that I will not be resigned to the audience poetry
has now.

Best,

Michael