Keston Sutherland seems to me exactly right when he writes:
> 2. I just don't believe that non-L poems, whatever they might be and
> granting for a moment that category's monstrous absorbancy, use a
> "transparent" language, designed merely to instate an argument or whatever
> sense-stickup, but feel rather that this has become a merely negative and
> evasive appraisal having the primary function of constituting for LPs
> their own insulated apodosis in which they are able practicably to state
> the terms of a supposed and critical difference - what makes them special
> is what other, better paid poets lack especially. This is hopelessly
> programmatic.
Though I find I'm always using terms like "langpo" and "mainstream" as
absolute opposites, I've always been a bit bothered by the
lumping-together involved in both terms. And the notion that all
'mainstream' poetry is naive about the transparency of language is
particularly suspect:
In the corner to my left (way to my left), from Buffalo NY, weighing in
at 200 Pounds (or is that Steins?) -- LANGPO! -The- poetry of
nontransparent language!
And in the corner to my right, from Iowa City, the Big, Bad Mainstream,
battling for naive belivers in linguistic transparency everywhere!
A simple syllogism does away with the identification of non-langpo with
linguistic transprency:
1. Mark Strand isn't a language poet. If he is, the term no longer
means anything (and I'll eat my copy of _The Marginalization of
Poetry_).
2. Mark Strand certainly does use non-transparent language. I mean,
all those poems in _The Continuous Life_ that begin with the ends of
sentences that we never get to see the beginning of are exactly the kind
of foregroundings of the materiality of language / moments of
undecidability / programmatically constructed things that we think of as
non-transparent.
3. You can be a non-language poet and use nontransparent language.
[An example of this technique of Strand's (not the best, but the
shortest):
"From a Lost Diary"
down? That I have withdrawn from the abuses of time means little or
nothing. I am a place, a place where things come together, then fly
apart. Look at the fields disappearing, look at the distant hills, look
at the night, the velvety, fragrant night, which has already come,
though the sun continues to stand at my door.
Okay, mostly 'readable' transparent stuff, but what about that opening
word? A number of poems in the book use this technique of the arbitrary
break in syntax. And other mainstreamers -- Bob Hass, for example --
have moments of equal nontransparency]
So -- when is a mainstreamer not a mainstreamer? I suppose we could say
that there is a tendency to transparency in mainstream poetry, and a
tendency to non-transparency in langpo, but the making of the categories
into absolutes seems untenable.
--
Robert Archambeau
Department of English
Lake Forest College
Lake Forest, IL 60045
http://www.lfc.edu/~archamb/
Only irony is eternal
--Andrei Codrescu
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