Ah, Mark
Yeah, youve hit the nail etc. (& here I am; I do have a chance to
connect, just not much time while busy with friends, & with reference
to that other thread I didnt think I'd be starting, just in Gimli
Manitoba, where all the Icelanders live when not in Iceland, it seems).
What's useful, indeed.
Although, since I taught modern & Canadian poetry, I did spend some
time thinking about the 'canon' & what my version might be.
I may be a bit like you in this, Mark: I enjoy narratives that work,
but seem to have no ability to construct them myself....
Doug
Quoting "Mark Weiss" <[log in to unmask]>:
> The taste of poets, myself included, is usually pretty close to
> home: one likes what one finds useful for one's own craft, cares
> passionately for what one learns from. Adequacy in the abstract
> simply doesn't count, for most of us. It's not a matter of
> dispassionate, disinterested canon-building.
>
> Re: "the deal": I don't see how anyone can argue with the notion
> that when one derives one's manner from a pre-existing body of work
> one begs comparison. Hell, to be so profoundly referential is to
> enter into public dialogue with the older work.
>
> Re: narrative. Personally, not a problem for me, though I seem to be
> incapable of sustaining it for very long. I love, for instance,
> Koch's A Season on Earth (both rhymed and narrative). I didn't love
> this particular narrative.
>
> Mark
>
> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Douglas Barbour <[log in to unmask]>
>> Sent: Aug 6, 2009 10:35 AM
>> To: [log in to unmask]
>> Subject: Re: "incapacity"/New Formalism
>>
>> I'm not so sure, Fred.
>>
>> I mean I see all too many 'poems' in some version of 'free
>> verse' (which Pound reminds us is never 'free' to the person who knows
>> what s/he's doing) that are far too prosey, & boring. In pretty well
>> all the 'kinds' of poetry going.
>>
>> And, as I've just been reading John Newlove again (a Canadian poet of
>> terrifically powerful understatement, etc, for those who've never
>> heard of him), as well as a bunch of others ranging across straight
>> lyric through narrative kinds to philosophical lyric, etc, I'd say
>> that, if we're wiling to admit that readers out there are, in fact, as
>> eclectic as writers are (& as both writers & readers committed
>> 'sincerely' [never know how to take that word any more] to the kind[s]
>> they like), that whatever 'the deal' is, it's a rather loose
>> formulation....
>>
>> With lots of infighting among those who are sure they know 'the
>> deal'...?
>>
>> Hey, just look at us!
>>
>> Doug
>> On 5-Aug-09, at 2:25 PM, Frederick Pollack wrote:
>>
>>> Re "should be in prose": Wordiness and padding is of course a flaw.
>>> But I often see this argument applied to lines that are neither,
>>> rather deliberately rich in detail, lucid, and, horror of horrors,
>>> narrative. A kind of strained nervous cleverness, constantly trying
>>> to invent *some meaning or response for what one is reading - this
>>> readerly state, inevitable when reading Raworth or Prynne or Brian
>>> Henry or Laura Moriarty or Susan Howe etc. etc., seems to be the
>>> *only permissible one to advanced opinion.
>>>
>>> *That's "the deal."
>>
>> Douglas Barbour
>> [log in to unmask]
>>
>> http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/
>>
>> Latest books:
>> Continuations (with Sheila E Murphy)
>> http://www.uap.ualberta.ca/UAP.asp?LID=41&bookID=664
>> Wednesdays'
>> http://abovegroundpress.blogspot.com/2008/03/new-from-aboveground-press_10.html
>>
>> There are as many fools in the world as there are people.
>>
>> Sigmund Freud
>
>
Douglas Barbour
11655 - 72 Avenue NW
Edmonton Alberta T6G 0B9
That’s not a cross look it’s a sign of life
Frank O’Hara
|