Tim,
 
I was interested in your comments below. What happens, for example, if you play your second paragraph against, say the practice of Keats - reading Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton, Dante for models; inter-acting with the work of Leigh Hunt, who is one of his earlier publishers - isn't this fitting poems into models, templates, family resemblances - or, at least, developing his own work through engagements with these earlier models? Isn't some of the early work 'skewed' by wanting it to be accepted by Hunt? And aren't Keats's letters frequently involved in theorising his practice and theorising for future practice - developing a poetics?
 
I wondered also about your statement that, for you, theory and poetics always come after the fact. Isn't the theorising of one fact the context for the next fact ... even if the next fact then requires the theorising to be reconsidered. In short, i am wondering whether the relationship between theorising and practice isn't rather a dialectic.
 
 
Robert

________________________________

From: British & Irish poets on behalf of Tim Allen
Sent: Sun 29/08/2010 10:34
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: "The Conspiracy Against Poems" by Adam Fieled at The Argotist Online



Yes Mark, I was slightly surprised by your knee-jerk response to the 
subject, knowing from past posts that you actually have delved into 
similar areas of critique, and have agreed with me on issues connected 
with the negative influence of academia and institutional careerism on 
modern poetry. But yes, I agree that in the article Fieled appears to 
be lumping all of it in together and is conflating, without question, 
'postmodernism' with 'experimental' etc - one of the reasons why it 
makes it difficult to talk about without, as I said, going around the 
sides.

I don't think the people who write the stuff he is thinking of do it 
in the way he is thinking of (that sounds awful, pass), in other words 
I don't think people write consciously to fit their poems into 
theories - they write to fit the poems into models, templates, family 
resemblances. They write to please and to conform. They do this 
because of skewed contexts, contexts in which writing processes and 
habits are channeled in certain directions by needs other than the 
desire to create poetry for its own sake. I don't mean to make any 
retro case for a pure or raw naturalized poetry, because such a thing 
is very rare anyway, but I would make the case for an 'honest' poetry.

For me theory and poetics has always come after the fact, and it is in 
'after the fact' I have always found them to be illuminating. I just 
cannot imagine it being the other way around - visions of a sterile 
brittle poetry come to mind. Yes, of course then, the being aware of 
poetic theories, influences what gets written next, and in what way; 
no escape from that, but that is not the same thing as writing to 
conform to the expectations of a theory. Processional rules are 
something else, but again, I have a suspicion that this is something 
else Fieled associates negatively with 'postmodernism'.

Ironically too, and in opposition to what the article says, most of 
the best Language poetry was written in the early years when the same 
poets were so hotly debating theory etc.... Mmmmmm. In some cases the 
two things were so entwined they were almost impossible to separate - 
the birth of postmodern reflexivity etc. But it went wrong, not 
because of the poetics, but because of the contexts those poetics were 
later placed in, in power bases and academia etc.

I suppose I should be talking to Adam Fieled about this.

Cheers

Tim A.


On 29 Aug 2010, at 03:43, Mark Weiss wrote:

> If I'm mistaken I apologize. But it's how I read the essay. I'm 
> absolutely with him when he objects to poetry that comes out of 
> theory rather than the other way around, and I've made myself 
> unpopular in a lot of circles by saying do, and going beyond that to 
> criticize the whole creative writing academic enterprise. But note 
> that he repeatedly refers to "postmodernism" as if there were one 
> kind only. It's his straw man and his bete noir. He's not saying 
> that there are some versions of experimenatalism (synonymoous with 
> postmodernism in his lexicon) that go too far, he's saying they all 
> do.