The problem, of course, is that neither Graham nor Ramke nor their sponsors told the participants, all of whom paid for the privilege, what the rules were. Or rather, they lied about the rules.
I had the distinct misfortune, by the way, as a graduate student of reading hundreds of pages of perfectly made heroic couplets and blank verse by poets famous or infamous in their day and now largely forgotten. Try Davenant's epic or anything of Prior for reasonably accessible examples. If there had been contests back then they would have been participants. And perhaps winners--both were poets laureate.
Mark
-----Original Message-----
From: Marcus Bales <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Aug 2, 2005 10:21 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Cummings
On 1 Aug 2005 at 9:15, Alison Croggon wrote:
> ... 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".<
Poetry is like a 100 metre race in one way: both are artificially
conceived, a narrowing down of a set of rules out of a broader human
experience. We say the record-holder of the 100 metre race is "the
world's fastest human", for example, as though the only running ever
done was done at the 100 metre distance. Also, still similarly, poets and
their advocates make a similar claim about poetry, though, don't they --
that poetry is the best use of language or the highest art, that the title
"poet" and the description "poetry" are honorific.
It seems to me that it is the combination of the claim that "poet" and
"poetry" are both an honorific with the claim that there is no way to tell
the difference between "poet" and "non-poet" or "poetry" and "prose"
that lead directly to the sporting competitiveness you deplore. So long
as anyone can play and there are no rules, what do you expect? As for
whether any given behavior is cheating when there are no rules, well,
come on! If there are no rules, there is no cheating.
We should be grateful to the Bin Ramkes and Jorie Grahams of the
world for demonstrating so vividly and completely the principle that
without rules there is no cheating. What seems to me to be over-
reacting is the outrage with which their behavior is disparaged. It's the
sour grapes of sore losers who didn't think of doing just as Ramke and
Graham did. It's no more reasonable to protest that Cummings benefited
from his class and educational situation than it is to object to Ramke's
and Graham's behavior. He played within the rules of the time, and
anyone who was born to a wealthy family and played all their life with
the sons and daughters of famous university luminaries, and who went
to a famous university with them, would do the same today. Wasn't there
a guy named Merrill recently? No doubt Ramke and Graham believe that
if mere social position and money can be used to produce prominence,
how different is it, after all, to use work position and friendships to
produce prominence?
Marcus
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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