Hi, Ana,
I see what you mean about "reactionary", and you supported your view with
what you concluded after talking with a friend:  "but in a general attitude
of openness
to the world and to novelty."

I felt that you were saying, as well, that "reactionary" meant using
formerly accepted, now for the most part outmoded, poetic forms, and that
using those forms now *does* affect how modern readers react to, understand
and interpret the message.  You supported that view when you said:
"not every good artist can be a innovator, but all should be quite free,
and that means also formally free."
If you mean that the good artist feels free to employ modern forms, and even
older forms, then I agree with you.

I think that modern readers *are* affected by the use of now-outmoded forms.
 We are not divorced from our time; we are influenced by forms; we *do* use
forms, though they are different from older forms.  Now-accepted forms more
closely approach prose, but they are as binding on our writer- and
reader-consciousness as older accepted forms.

My belief is that poet geniuses make form [any form] invisible---in all
times and cultures.  If the scaffold of form is obvious, then the poet has
not yet come near genius in her work.  I've read only one USAmerican New
Formalist poem which made form nearly invisible; it's remarkably close to
genius.

Best,

Judy

2003/1/1 Ana Olinto <[log in to unmask]>

> you would be right if by reactionary i meant politically reactionary.
> but what i mean is emotionally, sensitively reactionary, which is, rather
> than not longing for or supporting a new world, not seeing and feeling new
> things,
> or i should better say, old things in a new way.
> perhaps i shouldn't have used the word reactionary.
> i should have said orthodox. a sonnet is indeed orthodox at least in much
> of its metric, though we should not be formalistic to the point of not
> enjoying a
> good modern or contemporary sonnet, or of giving more value to it than to a
> lesser unorthodox poem, or of seeing that a specific sonnet it can be
> modern and contemporary in many ways, even if not in most of its metric.
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Jon Corelis" <[log in to unmask]>
> To: <[log in to unmask]>
> Sent: Monday, August 03, 2009 9:17 PM
> Subject: Re: "incapacity"
>
>
>
>  if a form, however charming
>>> and creative, is somewhat reactionary, the meaning it brings is, at least
>>> in a great measure, also reactionary.
>>>
>>
>> I don't understand this.  How can a literary form be reactionary?  Is
>> blank verse reactionary?  Is a sonnet?  Does that mean that it's
>> impossible to write in those forms without validating aristocratic,
>> conservative, or obsolete values?  To turn it around, T. S. Eliot and
>> Ezra Pound may fairly be said to be politically reactionary, yet
>> though they wrote in traditional forms, they also were two of the
>> major creators of modern free verse.  So it seems that radical formal
>> innovation is no guarantee of political progressiveness.  In Italy, at
>> least, leading-edge formal innovations such as Futurism were connected
>> with fascism (Marinetti), and one of the major and most radically
>> innovative of twentieth century French prose fiction was Celine.   We
>> could also on the other hand point to a strong strain in leftism
>> against "decadent bourgeois" avant-gardism, as in Stalinist "social
>> realism," which produced works the ethos of which seems to the
>> unenlightened strangely similar to Nazi propaganda.  In short, I don't
>> see the historical justification for the equation "formally
>> reactionary = politically reactionary/formally innovative =
>> politically progressive."
>>
>> --
>> ===============================================
>>
>>  Jon Corelis    http://jcorelis.googlepages.com/joncorelis
>>
>> ===============================================
>>
>