In message <[log in to unmask]>,
Christopher Vallance <[log in to unmask]> writes
>
>I have a general concern about overly theorized approaches to poetry, indeed
>about any form of poetry that is not generally accessible, that is provides
>no 'ins' for the reader. Work with depth of meaning necessarily avoids
>paraphrase, but there is an important difference between a piece that
>resists simplification and one that makes no sense outside of a particular
>group of practitioners. Poetry is already close enough to becoming a form
>of literary esperanto.
Really? I don't in any case know what 'generally accessible' means:
people's areas of reference are so diverse (are arguably becoming more
so) that nobody can be sure that ANY reference will hit the mark. I once
had to explain to a class who Fats Domino was; I'd stupidly assumed that
early rocknroll is a kind of common currency. The history of poetry (not
just 20th C) is full of examples of poems considered utterly opaque in
their time which are now not thought difficult at all; in fact the real
difficulty of reading a lot of poems is to rid your mind of all the
things you already think or have been told they mean. The pleasure on
the other hand of reading contemporary work (and dead poets who have
slipped the critical net) is that you're free of that interpretative
burden; the chance that there's 'nothing in it' is one you have to take,
isn't it? Does this make me a literary esperantist?
>
>Being deliberately provocative can I suggest that in order to keep
>everyone's feet on the ground poetry publishers should refuse to accept
>manuscripts that do not contain at least one poem that could be read at a
>wedding or a funeral. Let's, in a limited way, give the punters what they
>want.
>
A vast amount of poetry is published, a good deal of it 'giving the
punters what they want' in this sense. What I've never discovered is who
these punters are & whether they really want it.
--
Alan Halsey
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