Well, that could well be a divide, but that it is a divide between two
kinds of poetry, one advanced the other reactionary, is highly
unproven. How are we to say that a non-advanced poem is necessarily
imitative, cannot be a mapping? Originality cannot consist entirely
in formal innovation. They used to say that if you can understand it
it tells you what you already know, which is clearly nonsense.
And what's the description of these "values" that Tim locates and
finds definitive? What processes? The language is all jumbled up and
fragmented; there are no completed sentences -- That might attract
people or repel them; some people might suspect the conventionality of
the new, which as we all know here is a powerful attraction. Michael
Haslam's poems are reactionary because they're in sentences? Denis
Riley's recent lyrical poems are reactionary because they rhyme
formally? How can we say that Simon Armitage's poems are not, or
cannot be, a path through the wilderness of phenomena to a conclusion?
If they cannot, for what reason? (One day I'll read some). I don't see
how you have said anything about a poem until you get down to its
actual linguistic operations.
Not that your terms, Mark, (conception, mapping etc.) don't seem to me
to offer a likely ground for interesting poems ("interestingness is a
bourgeois category") but too abstract, I think, to guarantee the
result free from staleness.
pr
On 3 Dec 2013, at 21:58, Mark Weiss wrote:
Peter, I know you resist the idea, but it's a question neither of
qualities nor features but of ways of conceiving the poem and going
about it. I won't bait you with the word process, because I know it
makes you foam at the mouth, tho it's pretty accurate. So I'll try it
this way. The paraphrasable ideas in poems are rarely original or
profound. What's of interest, it seems to me, is the path through the
wilderness of phenomena to whatever conclusion. What's produced is a
map, a way of configuring a world. Useless if that map is just a
reproduction--the exciting maps are maps of discovery. And the maps
are usually the ideas that are worth taking away. Form of poem, form
of thought, form of world.
That, for me, is the divide. There are lots of ways to get there. And
presumably one can feign the excitement of discovery, tho it's a lot
harder to pull off.
-----Original Message-----
From: Peter Riley
Sent: Dec 3, 2013 2:27 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: baBoom
On 3 Dec 2013, at 18:20, Tim Allen wrote:
“If you just concentrate on the poetic differences, say between a poem
by Simon Armitage and one by Tom Raworth, you uncover a mind boggling
list of opposing values with regard to what poetry is, or can be, or
whatever. Those differences are facts, not illusions.”
No, but it is an illusion to think that these facts, these "values",
will, in themselves, tell you anything about the worth of the poetry,
on one side or the other, nor that they will necessarily put the two
poets into an exclusive opposition. Because they are not qualities of
the poem but features of it.
pr.
