I take a personal interest in this, having just wrapped up a sequence which
veered, intentionally, towards parataxis but kept getting snagged by
something a little more concrete ("propositioned by this theme / or that") -
hence, "soft avant-garde", in just that sense, of not having the courage of
one's experimental convictions (or of turning out to have the courage of
some other, hopefully better, convictions after all). One of the feelings I
kept getting, all along, was the feeling that I was lapsing into *style* -
that actually one could go on writing verses that sounded much the same as
the ones I was writing without necessarily doing any of the thinking that I
was doing at the same time, and even at times that this was already
happening. Certain constructions came up time and time again, particularly
the one I'll call (borrowing a phrase) "that's the bit where you say it, and
that's the bit where you take it back", e.g. "flesh scorched to earth / will
rise again from clay to model justice / " - wait for it - "perhaps, but not
in this life". I think I got away with it just enough for the whole thing
not to have been, in my own hearing at least, a disaster; but something
tells me it would be a bad idea to try writing any more cheques against that
account.
Where I start to go off any poet *big time* is where I think they've caught
themselves lapsing into style, and thought "the heck with it, it sounds
good, the punters will never notice" and carried on regardless. Tennyson
used to get accused of that, of settling for "Parnassian"; and I suspect
that it's the same accusation, at bottom, that's being levelled here.
Dominic
|