"It was contemporary North American poetry that I now
found wanting. Compared to the British, a lot of what
I saw in our magazines and books struck me as
formulaic. The favorite kind of poem was a
first-person, realistic narrative that told of some
momentous or perfectly trivial experience. It was
written in free verse often barely distinguished from
prose. Audacious flights of the imagination and use of
metaphor were rare. In the age of political
correctness and the evr-growing lists of forbidden
words, topics, and attiftudes, irony and wit became
suspect. And so did humour. The chief strategy of
these poems was to conceal that they were poems by
avoiding anything taht seemed too imaginative or
irreverent. . . ."
I agree 100% with every syllable of the above, and I don't see how anyone else
couldn't after examining the following passages taken quite at random from the
2004 issues of the most prestigious American poetry journal:
========
Crow school
is basic and
short as a rule—
just the rudiments
of quid pro crow
for most students.
========
Egg-white house, old
ache in the rafters,
small as a button but
yearning for zero:
a sparrow parts the chimney
and veers for my face.
========
While the man is away
telling his wife
about the red-corseted woman,
the woman waits
on her queen-sized bed.
========
Twilight folds over houses on our street;
its hazy gold is gliding on our front lawns,
delineating asphalt and concrete
driveways and shadows.
========
At the skating park
ice-sheathed twigs observe
my ex-husband loosing our son on the ice
like a hurling champion.
========
Minnesota
snapping turtles
clutched by little cities
are wet bursts of moonstone
wreathed in scum,
========
Like Gorky I sometimes question my doubts
outside to the yard and question the sky,
longing to have the fight settled, thinking
I can't go on like this
========
That September in Positano
the sky with its washed out palette
furnished a finely calibrated counterpoint
to the exhaustion of our quaint, cheap pension
========
Not Delft or
delphinium, not Wedgwood,
among the knickknacks,
not wide-eyed chicory
evangelizing in the devil strip --
========
=====================================
Jon Corelis [log in to unmask]
www.geocities.com/joncpoetics
=====================================
____________________________________________________________________
