On Sun, 4 Jan 2004 14:30:52 +0100, Trevor Joyce
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>>Are you suggesting that poetry which isn't explicitly
>>self-referential is necessarily somehow deficient? This strikes me
>>as a very perilous generalization. (In fact most generalizations
>>about poetry strike me as highly dodgy.) Anyhow, you seem to imply
>>that metalinguistic usage is in itself enough to produce 'poetry at
>>its highest' (whatever that might be), which is certainly untrue in
>>my experience; some of the most turgid stuff I've encountered in
>>contemporary poetry seems to labour under precisely this impression.
>>And have you sufficient familiarity with poetry in other languages
>>to justify so sweeping a judgement? What about Du Fu? Basho? Daibhi
>>O Bruadair? Homer? The world's traditions of 'folk poetry'?
>
>Else my newly fostered spirit of rebellion might suggest to me that
>you're talking nonsense.
>
>Say it isn't so!
>
>Trevor
Poetry representing itself, self-fulfilling its needs and self-reflecting
its own methodologies is an old habits of poets. I think self-referential
poetry is nowadays almost impossible not to find. Anyhow, the process was
started as I said by Cavalcanti (‘Donna me prega’) and Dante, of course
(Vita Nova).
Shakespeare’s The Tempest was mainly a metacritic play.
It was then continued in the ‘500, by the Italian Vittoria Colonna and her
fellow poets.
Metaphysical poets in England tended as well as to be self-referential, and
Eliot fits in this tradition of self-referentiality perfectly well. Writing
the way Eliot wrote was nothing but a reconstruction of his procedures and
a formalizations of his own discourse. This does not exclude that non-self-
referential poets or poems are less valuable.
Could you make an example or post a totally non-referential poem written in
our contemporary post-modern times? Metalanguages are proliferating all
over, and metacriticism flourishes too after them.
I know, it is a nightmarish reality, this aesthetic world of poetry. But
please, post me an authentic poem in the fashion of socialist literature,
with a sincere eye to objectivity.
Any poetry of the Self is a metapoem. If the poet is speaking of
him/herself, he is speaking of him/herself as poet and thus he is writing a
metapoem (with possible psychological chiasms)#
But look your style of addressing me is rather aggressive, telling me that
I so peak nonsense.
Are you trying to disappoint me so I suspend my contributions to this
particular thread? Is it not what you need, as a list owner, that is:
poets talking and writing to this metacritic list about poetry?
Oh , Goddddddddddd. I little bit of more awareness of what the list is
about would not be unwelcome: this is a self-referentialspace. By the way,
I define 'nipples' and 'lips' and something else (male) as 'turgid staff'.
It is the first time I encounter a definition of this kind for poems. Thank
you.
Ciao, erminia
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