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 <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Dec 3, 2013 2:27 PM
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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.
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