Todd:
I can try to speak about/for the three threads of "American" poetry:
- the popularizers, wishing to maintain the older, popular notion of
poetry as a public art, a communal experience shared between writer
and reader;
-the high modernists, responding with well-known notions of the
self-sufficient art object and the autonomous artists who hold no
responsibility to a reading public or public affairs;
-poets who can still trace their lineage to the radical labor movement
of the 1910's, combining aspects of both popular and modernist poetries
in order to intervene in specific historical settings or to interact with
specific audiences;
all have contributed to why the work is not in the same ballpark with
"mainstream" lit, since it's function is that it can never be taken for
granted. It announces itself as a problem, a ground to be fought over.
And the problem has several points:
-poetry's complicity in some of the cultural evils it articulates itself
against;
-poetry's inaccesibility to the common ear, it baggage of priviledge
(oftten misconstrued as difficulty);
-the danger that poetry's eloquence may masquerade as an achieved
truth, as a closing of an argument, when the issues at stake are too
complex, too contingent;
-poetry's feigning, its ability to play fast and loose with the facts;
-poetry's presumption: its apparent capability of expressing things,
when maybe the things it addresses seem to want to tend towards
silence;
- and at the same time, in spite of all this, the possibility that poetry
might be one of the occasions for the renewal of hope.
These problems show how poetry continues to be relatively absent
from the daily lives of so many of us (although it's evolved in the later
years in forms such as poetry slams and community-based workshops,
"places" where --- the activity becomes more vital than the product )...
and perhaps so very present in the lives of...
just wondering out loud late at night... celebrating the problems...
Cheers,
Gerald Schwartz
Only Others Are
www.geocities.com/legible5roses/schwartz.html
> Lists may be nonsense, but perhaps practicing poets, which many of us are,
> fail to heed them at our peril, when the lists are polls voted on by
> professed poetry readers and lovers?
>
> That is, though no one would want to suggest that poets write with an
> audience in mind (we leave that to screenwriters and potboiler authors),
it
> is interesting to note that the poets most favored are those who obviously
> wrote poems which refer to a recognizable world (sic) and recongnizable
> human emotions and concerns (religion, death, nature, love); and in some
> cases, even used humour.
>
> Having just come back from a large book fair, I noted with interest the
> brisk trade in novels - global deals for translations into all known
> languages - and how readings by thriller authors such as Ken Follet draw
the
> cameras and crowds, while the poets make do with smaller audiences.
>
> Of course, such acclaim or interest is not the point of writing. But it
may
> be a barometer of something.
>
> How can intelligent contemporary poems reach the sort of people who
profess
> to still love poetry, without "selling" poetry short, seems a relevant
> question, then, after such a poll.
>
> Todd
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