In case no-one else wishes openly to disgree with Chris's post on recent
poetry by some women poets, I'll tap in my virtual oar. I didn't like any
of the excerpts Chris posted, and have to say that I'm surprized you did,
Chris. The obvious rant would require little attention to the details of
what you posted, but we're familiar enough with that endless verbal storm
to bypass it just this once. Instead:
I leave myself about, slatternly,
bits of me, and times I liked:
I let them go on lying where
they fall, crumple, if they will
there is no prosodic urgency here, the verse form derives from Butler's
Hudibras down through Swift, Green, Churchill et al, and has a
considerable history as a medium for rebarbative satiric outbursts that
has obviously informed these lines not a jot, despite their mediocre
retention of its syllabic schedule. Their patience is part-sardonic,
part-dismissive, reliant on a measured apathy for the quotidian which is
contrived resolutely to exclude even the most implicit reference to
anything but private sentiment, anything but the re-branded pathos of
inward-looking outspokenness. The word 'bits' is patently calculated to
suggest an offhand, rather than highbrow, character of reflexive
attention; but no sense of the irony involved in making such a choice is
even tested out, let alone questioned or admitted. The semantic ambit is
common-sense and the everyday, its syllabic routine is a safety net for
this, or set of rubber-rings, which (quite apart from its offensive
superfluity) introduces no provocation to identify with the poem's schemes
of persuasion and perlocutionary apparatus, but remains content merely to
banter the reader into identifying with the very attitude described
(commonsensical everyday self-discussion). This last point is one I'd
extend to all of the excerpts you posted Chris. Why on earth does the
earth need such stuff, other than to keep printers in work, and to give
little didacts like me the chance to run off in the mouth.
Anyhow, thanks to Allison for the post on Russian poetry. k
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