Traditions and lineage being only one kind of pigeonhole, I assume you'd go
further and resist other types of genre-fication too. Forgive me if that's
wrong.
Anyway, I agree with you - you start to read and then you throw away,
ideally, all the things you "knew" about the poem before you began.
The way Agassiz would have us eventually know this creature in front of us,
laying aside its species and genus - just the individual.
(The subjective element is inescapable either way - what I think I know
about Hermetic poetry is just as subjective as what I think I read when I
read "Felicità raggiunta, si cammina
per te sul fil di lama...")
Maybe, when people are together long enough they eventually forget all
their preconceived ideas about what kind of a person their partner is and
just know them for who they are. But maybe those old ideas are replaced
with new preconceived ideas...
It's not easy and perhaps it's full of theoretical holes. Resist genre-
fication completely and (leaving literature aside) - does one interpret a
fork as a cathedral, a cathedral as a fork? It is certainly possible to do
this, sometimes with good reason. Such gymnastics are part of a poet's
habitual skill-set.
I feel inconsistent in my own receptivity to different artefacts. Mostly I
feel averse to approaches that "place" something first and read it "in the
light of" that very narrow pencil-beam. But when I'm listening to a
classical symphony, then its genre and where it sits in musical tradition
almost defines the central meaning of the work so far as I'm concerned.
Perhaps this might mean that I lack a profounder response to Beethoven; or
it might mean that the nature of this kind of artefact is such that it's
concerned with its own place in tradition and plays off its quasi-communal
relationship with other artefacts. In poetry that might apply to some large
circles of sonneteers and verse epistolists of the past - the art they
produce might be to a large extent unaccountable without its genre context,
like snatches from a conversation.
I liked your list of poets that differ critically. I hope you might say
more about them. What do you think of Ron Silliman's argument that poets
with serious ambition need to identify themselves (however misleadingly) by
banding together into groups in order to get themselves onto the public
agenda? - "Unbranded" poetry, Ron claims (I hope I don't misrepresent him),
is hardly ever read at all, and even if it is, any thoughts that it might
give rise to are never articulated; there's no media presence and no
debate.
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