I think Jon's portrayal of the inevitable progress of poets is on-beam but too
schematic.
There has never been anything to stop those poets who have reached the
"Selected Poems" stage from turning "back" to small press publication whenever
they want, realising as many of the best ones do that the small press is the
field of fertilisation for poetry in general and that they owe it a constant
debt. Alice and I, as magazine editors, have found such grandees as Bob
Creeley, Amiri Baraka, Ron Padgett, Anne Waldman, Ed Dorn, Denise Riley,
Lorenzo Thomas, Iain Sinclair, Anne Portugal, Dominique Fourcade, Andrew
Crozier, Michael Moorcock, Anselm Hollo (Hi! Anselm, if you're reading this)
-- oh, just a host of people generously ready to submit to our small
circulation mags alongside the equally valued but lesser-known. We've both
reached the "Selected" stage ourselves, I suppose, but spend much of our time
wondering how to back the small mags and the younger poets.
I take the point about web hits, but what actual reading experience is
involved in a "hit" is unclear to me. I doubt that many people download and
treasure the poems they hit. But let's swing along, as usual, see what
happens.
Problems, too, Jon, with the Callimachus poem if and only if it's meant as
some kind of message. I mean, fine as a squib nicely translated -- why not?
But let's not imagine that his antiquity or even his witty influence on later
writing give Callimachus any special rights on the question of political
poetry. Pity more poets in that patrician/slave/downgraded-women society
weren't tackling such issues. Thank god for Aristophanes or Euripedes. I'm
reading a lot of 19th century French history right now and the "art for art's
sake" poetry schools can look pretty disgusting at times: the working classes
slaughtered in the streets and there our heroes are welcoming the repression
and slaving away at their purity, and their mistresses. The world's first
Nobel prize for poetry went to a Frenchman of this school, Sully Prudhomme.
Who reads him now? Two million people went to Victor Hugo's funeral: for all
his many faults not least of political perspective, I still read Hugo.
Poetry has had historically many, many functions. Why limit it in case some
poem should escape of less than "perfect" form? Sully Prudhomme himself has a
poem about a perfect crystal vase with a fissure that gradually destroys it:
history has eventually made this poem self-ironic.
Best
Doug
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