----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jon Corelis" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, August 03, 2007 12:05 PM
Subject: Re: A comment


> Wilde's remark, as usual, is such a deft inversion of conventional
> wisdom that we're likely in our admiration of its cleverness to lose
> sight of its serious point -- a point which is in need of frequent
> restating today.
>
> That point is, to put it more clumsily, that the intensity, the
> sincerity, the genuineness of the emotions which have generated a poem
> give that poem absolutely no claim on the admiration, respect, or even
> the attention of the poem's readers, and to assume it does (as too
> many poems now days do) is to guarantee its badness.  Poetry is the
> ultimate democratic art:  it can only work in a space where poet and
> listener are on terms of perfect equality; accordingly, any poem which
> presumes that the genuineness of the emotions in which it originated
> will secure a reader's attention, unless there is something wrong with
> that  reader, is doomed to failure before it begins.  The first thing
> a poet needs to understand and accept is that there is no reason for
> anyone else in the world to feel the slightest interest the poet's
> emotions.
>
> I think this is what Keats meant when he wrote that "we hate poetry
> that has a palpable design on us -- and if we do not agree, seems to
> put its hand in its breeches pocket."  This is also, I think, why it's
> so hard to write successful political poetry, and why almost all such
> poetry being written today (an unfortunately large chunk of the whole)
> is so awful.  The instant it becomes clear that a poem is offering us
> a choice between proving one's virtue by agreeing with it, or standing
> condemned of viciousness, or at least of ignorance, by disagreeing
> with it, at that moment it also becomes clear that the poem in
> question has entered The Land Of That Which Sucks.
>
> -- 
> ===================================


This is excellently put.  The solution, in political poetry, is Brechtian 
"alienation": objectivity, or what appears to be objectivity, where the 
reader expects pathos.  That's stylistically impossible in the mainstream, 
where emotion is all, and where the field of emotions - the range of 
expected subject-matter - is very narrow.  So that poems ostensibly about 
facts, Vietnam or El Salvador or Iraq, merely express *feelings about these 
facts; hurt by the pain of others, the self demands sympathy for that hurt, 
admiration for its morality and sensitivity.  The language poets whom some 
on this list admire think that they solve this problem but merely sidestep 
it.  But I've argued this point before and am tired of it.

As to the larger issue, of the poet's emotion, its "genuineness" etc. - I 
see what you mean by "terms of perfect equality," but the formula leaves out 
the power of "voice" and persona.  The trick is a) to have emotions about 
interesting things, b) to place emotions in a context, rather than to assume 
they are the context.  Persona implies self-consciousness, and 
self-consciousness in poetry means consciousness of the reader.  Whom one 
seduces, through wit, irony, misdirection, into being interested in one's 
emotions; i.e., into sharing them.  "Confessionalism" succeeded when the 
persona was carefully constructed: Berryman's clown, Lowell's self-bemused 
aristocrat.  But always, in this connection, I think more of Milosz.  His 
subject-matter is often literally for the confessional.  His concerns are 
very private and "genuine."  But the persona knows he's not in a 
confessional; it knows that the reader is intelligent, secular, and guarded. 
So it addresses h/h with irony and self-deprecation - but never directly; it 
is always looking at something over the reader's shoulder.