There are all kinds of forces - entropic, inertial, the lamely derivative,
the habitual - which can force a poem into the stale or pre-programmed, and
anyone trying to write a poem and reflecting on the process must have come
across them.
Alison's earlier reference to the spaceship, or rather 'airplane', that
Mandelstam saw in Dante "which in full flight constructs and launches
another machine" and so on, "in order to maintain the integrity of flight
itself" marks something at the opposite extreme. (Though in Mandelstam it
has nothing to do with the flightless struggle of theory and practice.)
Like Peter, I'd be very doubtful indeed that those hampering forces were
only felt on one side of the divide.
Jamie
----- Original Message -----
From: "Peter Riley" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Thursday, September 09, 2010 11:00 AM
Subject: Re: "The Conspiracy Against Poems" by Adam Fieled at The Argotist
Online
> On 8 Sep 2010, at 18:36, Mark Weiss wrote:
>
> What I'm protesting against, and I think it's the definition of the rift,
> is poetry by assignment, or by anything that precedes the poem. The idea
> of a poem discovered in process is essential.
>
>
> If I could switch Mark's terms a little and talk instead of "programmed
> staleness" or "pre-endorsed writing" I think I'd get this better. I don't
> think a poem can exactly come out of a void; I find anyway, that there
> are always exemplars, even if what I produce doesn't in the end much
> resemble any of them. And that is I suppose discovery in process.
>
> I remember finding Douglas Dunn's book of elegies on the death of his
> wife stale for all its apparent openness; all the motions of the poems
> felt pre-endorsed and it seemed opportunist, as if he'd got the reader by
> the throat because you can't protest against such suffering or such
> "sincerity". But you can of course, you can place it against different
> versions of elegiac "sincerety" such as Lee Harwood's (in "Salt Water")
> or Peter Levi's (in "For Denis Bethell").
>
> But I repeat that the avant-garde is just as much riddled with acts of
> pre-endorsement or programming. And i wasn't thinking of the plodders,
> but rather of "bright young things" seduced into a kind of automatism,
> partly by their own second-hand dogmatic theorising.
>
> PR
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