Keston, sorry if I jumped to take offence at what seemed
like a bit of condescension. I'd really like to use this
forum to make friends and share informed enthusiasms,
as well as (perhaps) precisify some critical distinctions
once in a while.
I will perhaps relapse into lurker mode, since I may
not be a member of the club of deep-end-swimmers
who alone are permitted to say anything that might be
recognised as having any substance around here, but
I did at least *allude* to a few issues recently (from the
toddler's end of the pool) that may still have some
discursive life in them:
a) the extent to which any poet's 'theoretical' poetics
may definitively be read off from her poetry alone;
b) the role played by the poet's erudition and erudition-
strategies in some recent linguistically self-conscious
poetries, those dubbed very approximately Language
and Cambridge;
c) the 'quality gap' that sometimes obtains between
the poetics and the poetry (even, or especially, in
recent traditions that attempt to blur the distinction
between them);
d) the viability of consumption and market analogies
in explaining how various linguistically self-conscious poetries
'mean' or 'mean to mean', despite their self-evidence
to some of those who've already plumped for a
monistic ontology of 'everything's a commodity'.
If the olympic swimming coaches (imported from the
impressively athletic Eastern European teams?) at the
other end of the pool have already definitively answered
these questions and are dying of well-bred ennui, then
so be it and I'll try to keep my splashing down.
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