Stephen

Well, having been one of those who complained about lack of specifics I
can’t refuse to respond, and indeed I don’t want to, because I found what
you wrote very interesting.

There’s a changed feeling about kitschy content in postmodernist writers.
However you take Ashbery’s ”Variations, Calypso and Fugue on a Theme of
Ella Wheeler Wilcox” you can’t read it as just a cheap laugh at the
poetess. The Double Dream of Spring is full of Ashbery’s absorbtion with –
well, with whatever high modernism would have disapproved. It had begun
with “The Instruction Manual” in Some Trees – it’s one thing for Eliot to
dash off a brilliant line or two of ragtime or demotic speech and elevate
it into his high art (how clever, we are meant to think) but Ashbery from
the start wants to get away from this comfortable placing and to make poems
where it’s impossible for page after page  – what a liberation - to split
off the poem from the kitsch. Or in the later volumes, look at his cod
inversion here:

Its chamber was narrower than a seed
Yet when the doorbell rang
It reduced all that living to air
As “kyrie eleison” it sang

(“It was raining in the capital”)

or here:

Memory can but shift cold ashes around
When the depths of time it endeavours to sound.

(“Some words”)

These are not jokes, though they are jolts – we have to come to terms with
them in order to enjoy the brilliant new voice of the composite Ovidianism
in the latter poem, for example. It isn’t Irony.

Sentimental content keeps coming back at us, not in minor poets but in
great ones – think of the totally different terms in which it hits us in
e.g. Lee Harwood.

Ultimately, ultimately, I have a problem conceding that there is anything
tangibly “lesser” in the various popular artworks of Odense (which of
course I haven’t seen, but I make analogies ... it’s Somerset Arts Week). I
don’t really concede that “High Art” means something, so I see the “kitsch”-
response as a social phenomenon without a critical foundation. I guess
that’s relativist.

I recently found myself writing this about sentimentality:


“When people call something sentimental, it seems to involve assuming that
you can judge the quality of someone’s feelings on the basis of how they’re
manifested. But most people are incredibly bad at doing this, especially
when the object of their scorn comes from some very different sector of the
population (which it nearly always does).

But the heyday of literary obsession with “sentimentality” was really fifty
years ago, with Leavis and Lawrence. In a modern poetic the focus of our
worries, so it appears to me, is not sentimentality – that is transparent –
but individual feeling.”

(The last sentence is probably bollox, but anyway...)

I’m not sure if I’m disagreeing with you or not.

I found it interesting that the gobbets you listed didn’t for the most part
strike me as straightforwardly exemplifying bad poetry – I could work out
certain common threads but it seemed like all I was doing was psycho-
analysing your reactions, i.e. guessing. No doubt decontextualizing them
may in some cases have done a huge service.


best

Michael