Thanks for the reception of "Kathemeripoiesis." Maybe there is still an
audience for the epigram.
-------------------------------------------------
I'm afraid David Bircumshaw's "feeling of despair that poetry is no more
than a function of class-culture, in social terms," is quite justified.
Poetry in America, and to a somewhat lesser extent in Britain, has been
reduced to an academic humanities discipline, and its publications, like
publications generally in such disciplines, have basically a credentialing
function. Almost all scholarly publication now in the humanities is
intrinsically worthless, but it serves to accredit its producers as being
members in good standing of the academic club, and to rank them as having,
in proportion to the number of pages they have published and the prestige of
the journals and publishers which have accepted them, a certain understood
amount of right to tenure, grants, fellowships, visiting professorships, and
other academic perquisites. It would be naive to believe that this
accreditation and ranking are merely among the consequences of such
publication; they are really its purpose.
Read "poetry" for "publications" in the above, and you have exactly the
function of poetry in English speaking countries today. The situation is
even more horrible than poetry having degenerated into a class function: it
is now a function of the *academic* class system. It is the inevitable
result of such a situation that, as David Bircumshaw well says, "there is an
utter emptiness, a meaning of nothing, that infects the literary culture."
Today's poetry is meaningless because its purpose is not to be meaningful,
but to get its author that next workshop-leader appointment.
I have to disagree with him though that an outside reader of contemporary
English verse might imagine that everyone there "lived in twee little Lord
of the Rings style hamlets." As one such reader myself, the impression I
get is that everyone there lives in the suburbs, is divorced, is having an
affair, and teaches -- in other words, that they're just like you'd think
everyone here is from reading the most prevalent American poets.
-------------------------------------------------
Someone recently asked me if I were a published writer. I answered that you
should never ask a writer that question, because a writer who has no
publications will be irritated at having to admit it, and one who has
publications will be irritated that you haven't read them.
-------------------------------------------------
The only poem I've seen on this list this week is Anny Ballardini's "when
saturn meets venus," which I enjoyed for the gaudy language. I found myself
wondering though whether it might work better as two poems, one composed of
the first and last parts and the other of the middle paragraph.
-------------------------------------------------
Quote of the week:
I think it is better that at times like these
We poets should keep our mouths shut, for in truth
We have no gift to set a statesman right.
-- Yeats
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Jon Corelis [log in to unmask]
www.geocities.com/joncpoetics
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