Of course. We all go to school to the work of other poets (and to our own
earlier work). But the question is whether it's possible to divorce a
technique from a system of belief--to apply it as a sort of decoration--and
still create a convincing work of art. Maybe. It's impossible to know the
minds of the dead--it's entirely possible tht Donne, for instance, had no
committment to his manner of hearing language, that he was merely crafting
a simulacrum. But it's also true that empty artifice--the failure to be
convincing--is usually pretty apparently empty artifice, sooner or later,
no matter how crafty the marshalling of techniques scrounged here and there.
Mark
>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.
>
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