Candice wrote:
>a question about
>size/scale that's obviously related to my original point re Graham and
>intolerance of or toward the intellectual/philosophical poem, which I sense
>as one prevailing attitude in the current poetic culture. What strikes me as
>continuous between these two statements by Gould and Logan is not merely the
>recourse to "bombast" as a damning term for Graham's work but the expressed
>desire for the philosophic to yield to the lyric.
Well, I'll wander in, saying here that my acquaintance with Graham is so
slight as to render it useless - a mere impression (reinforced, I have to
say, by the poem Mark posted) of rhythmic blandness - so I'm not
addressing Graham but this point.
I would say rather that there is a prevalent strand of thought in which
the philosophic demands the yielding of the poetic. A poet like J.H.
Prynne is interesting in part because of that struggle is dramatised
within the poetry and (to my mind) the poetic does not yield - to me
Prynne is a profoundly lyric poet, even in the harsh dissonances of
Triodes. Philosophic is not necessarily a synonym for "intelligent" and
argument against its hegemony not necessarily an argument that is
anti-intellectual - it depends on what you think intelligence is within a
poem, and where you place your practice. I'm quite aware that many would
disagree with me.
But - how can you not take into "meaning" the stern poetic material - the
sound, the rhythm, the polished syntactic fracturing - of a poem like Her
Weasels Wild Returning? You can make an exegesis of what the poet "is
trying to say" (an exercise I always found rather insulting at school) or
you can listen to the poem. Shades of Isadora Duncan, who when she was
asked what a dance meant, simply danced it again. Or maybe I'm just
rehearsing again Sontag's argument "against interpretation". I'm not
saying that philosophy, of whatever kind, has no place in poetry - simply
that poetry does something else (I do not read Dante to find out about
scholasticism, although of course it is integral to the poem).
Best
Alison
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