On 1/8/05 1:31 AM, "Douglas Barbour" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> foetry.com is very interesting, Mairead, but I'm troubled fairly
> quickly as I find that both a number of the winners & a number of the
> judges are poets I admire very much; & I can well see that certain of
> the latter would be likely to choose works by certain of the former for
> the very good reason that their poetics are so close. I don't think one
> can choose a judge & then expect that person to choose a kind of poetry
> s/he has no truck with.
I had a good look at that site one day, and found it deeply depressing.
Aside from the sheer poisonousness of some of it, behind it is this idea of
"objectivity", as if poetry can be judged like a 100 metre race with a
clearly unambiguous "winner". This is not to say that there are not
problems with the whole American idea that in order to get published at all
one has to win a poetry competition - there clearly are huge problems. Here
small poetry presses are, at least in part, government funded, and so can
operate more like publishers.
In my experience, cliques are more often perceived than real. But also, the
most essential energies in the arts have always stemmed from loose
associations of those with like minds, "elective affinities", as Goethe
called them. Only in the worst circumstances are they actually cliques.
Advocacy, mutual support, mutual passion - these things are not in
themselves at all unethical, are in fact how new things happen and change in
any culture.
Best
A
Alison Croggon
Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
Editor, Masthead: http://masthead.net.au
Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com
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