No disrespect intended, Jon, but I'm a little surprised these are explosive questions for you. They seem fairly hoary to me.
<If a poem deserves respect as a moral statement, does it therefore deserve
<respect as poetic art?
This is vague to me. An example would help. If we get into the question of what is poetry, things will certainly get very difficult. Are the great moral statements of Martin Luther King poetry? For me, yes.
<Is it possible to write a bad poem deploring the Holocaust?
Of course. Bad is not necessarily a problem though. Great art can also be bad, or at least can gladly accommodate the bad. Also, as Hal says: depends who's writing it.
If someone showed me what I considered a bad poem about the Holocaust, my response would very much depend on my relationship to that person. I would always answer honestly. "Badness" might not be the most salient or relevant issue.
<There is apparently a general tacit agreement that it is not appropriate to judge <such a poem (about sexism) by the same critical standards as a poem about flowers <or sunrise or rivers. Is this something to worry about or not?
Do we have critical standards for poems about flowers, sunrises, and rivers? Anyway,
I'm much more interested in questions about sexist poems I have written myself.
They're good poems, I think. They make people laugh. But dammit they're sexist. Should I be ashamed?
Regarding tears: I confess to being prone to coming close to tears, sometimes, when I read. I haven't noticed an appreciable increase in applause. In any case,
poetry reading is not akin to folk-singing, playing the piano or exhibiting art.
Would that it were. I often feel very close to tears listening to poets read also.
Regarding your lonesome poet, do you mean there is a logical contradiction between
reading poems against war and not ride-sharing in order to conserve gas? People are very imperfect, poets included.
Mairead
www.maireadbyrne.blogspot.com (lots of bad poems here)
>>> [log in to unmask] 11/26/05 3:12 PM >>>
[The following is prompted mostly by my experience of going to more poetry
readings than I used to. These questions deal with explosive issues, and I
want to make it clear that I don't personally have any firm answers to them.
The fact that I feel as uncomfortable writing these questions as most people
will feel reading them I take as evidence that they are important and ought to
be discussed.]
If a poem deserves respect as a moral statement, does it therefore deserve
respect as poetic art?
Is it possible to write a bad poem deploring the Holocaust? If the answer is
no, what are the implications for aesthetics of the claim that a poem's
quality can be assured by its choice of subject matter? If the answer is yes,
then if someone showed you a bad poem deploring the Holocaust and asked what
you thought of it, how honestly would you answer?
A member of a poetry workshop reads a poem about the damaging effects of
sexism. The poem is a deeply felt expression of a personal experience which
clearly deserves compassion and respect. The group immediately starts talking
about the problem of sexism, about other poems on the theme, about how writing
poems about it can contribute to a solution. But nobody raises the issue of
whether the poem is good as poetry or not. There is apparently a general tacit
agreement that it is not appropriate to judge such a poem by the same critical
standards as a poem about flowers or sunrise or rivers. Is this something to
worry about or not?
At more than one open mike reading I have been to, someone reading a poem they
had written was so moved by it that they broke down in tears. The audience
response (myself included) was to applaud particularly loudly in sympathetic
support. Would a folk singer who was moved to tears while performing one of
their own songs be given a similar audience response? Would a pianist?
Would an artist standing sobbing before one of their own paintings?
A poet at a reading delivers several impassioned poems denouncing the Iraq
war, then goes into the parking lot, climbs into their car, and drives alone
home. Is there anything wrong with this scenario? Is there anything wrong
with the fact that it would almost never occur to anyone to wonder if there is
anything wrong with it?
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Jon Corelis
[log in to unmask]
www.geocities.com/jgcorelis
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