For me, Stephen's reply is right on the money.
I read recently at a small gathering in Cambridge. It was a small
circle, but open to anyone. I started to read my introduction to my
poem on Auden, about what he might have had to do to get into the US
in '37, about a hypothetical case of having to explain his
misdemeanours in Berlin and all that. I started to witter on about
American puritanism and the Immigration Service et al when a woman to
the right of me says, "Well not all American's are puritans..." so we
start having this "discussion", which is getting heated by the second,
but I manage to read my poem. Anyway, from a bad start, other things
happen and generally spiral until the end of quite an interesting
reading, the American decides to let us know where we (the poets she
didn't like) went wrong, of why the rest of our poetry didn't cut the
mustard: it wasn't from experience, too many long words, etc etc.
I think the point is, what gives this person - or any other person -
the right to say what is and what isn't poetry? Why should I kowtow to
the gatekeepers?
Roger
On 8/2/05, Stephen Vincent <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Cricket
> Cricket
> Cricket
>
> Aram Saroyan
>
> Perfect form, perfect meter, entirely accurate to its subject.
> Brilliant. Indeed, I agree with Marcus. Meter came first. Meter endures.
> Unfortunately I have a whole career in which, for the most part, I have
> fucked-up. Maybe it's not too late. Now I realize I can get the rules. I can
> practice. I will try as hard as I can. Will the metric gods forgive me? I
> know I have contributed to great damage. Should I start with the Old
> Testament or move on to Jesus - the forgiver - first? Or, pragmatically,
> should I rewrite the works of Charles Olson and William Carlos Williams as a
> form of practice - make each work metrically correct.
>
> Why does this argument seem like Yvor Winters - repeatedly - between 1925
> and 1960? Why do I think it's so boring??
>
> Stephen V
>
>
> > Marcus Bales wrote:
> >> poetry grew out of use, hard
> >> use, and misuse of the language and the rules. Poetry is metrical
> >> language; lacking meter, language cannot be poetry. It may be powerful,
> >> it may be art, it may be a lot of other things, too, but it cannot be poetry.
> >> The whole point of poetry is the meter, and without it what you've got is
> >> prose.
> >>
> > On 2 Aug 2005 at 10:20, Mark Weiss wrote:
> >> Sounds like the onward and upward school of thought. Was alliterative
> >> verse, or for that matter biblical verse organized as cumulative near
> >> -repetition, a failed experiment?<
> >
> > No, it's not the onward and upward school of thought: meter comes in
> > many forms.
> >
> > Mark Weiss wrote:
> >> If you substituted "music" for "meter" in your above statement I'd come
> >> loser to agreeing (but see below). In the formula as you present it,
> >> here's never been poetry in Spanish, as Spanish poets don't write
> >> canned verse, even in sonnets.<
> >
> > Meter comes in many forms. Is there really no meter in Spanish?
> > Someone said there's no meter in Hebrew.
> >
> > Lawrence Upton wrote:
> >>> What matters most is what is being said. I do NOT mean the abstractable
> >>> prose statement of what the poem "means" which so many crave, but what is
> >>> going on at that point in the poem
> >
> > Marcus Bales wrote:
> >>> Even accepting that you do not mean the prose statement of meaning, I
> >> think it's wrong that what matters most in poetry is what is being said.
> >> That's what matters most in prose. In prose one may fumble around for
> >> quite a while before one gets one's profound insight across, but
> >> fumbling around in poetry is just what makes poetry bad.
> >
> > Mark Weiss wrote:
> >> Lawrence can speak for himself, but my guess is this is a pretty
> >> thorough misunderstanding of what he's saying. It's difficult for me to
> >> understand how you missed "what is going on at that point in the
> >> poem," which includes the entire moment of discovery, in which music
> >> and meaning in the crudest sense are simultaneous.
> >
> > I understood Lawrence to say that "What matters most is what is being
> > said." since that's explicitly what he said. I disagree that what matters
> > most is what is being said because if "What matters most is what is
> > being said" is taken to be true, then much follows that seems absurd on
> > the face of it. I think that what matters most is how what is being said is
> > said; that it is the how that makes it poetry, not the what.
> >
> > Marcus
>
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