A new horror to watch out for - Dan Goia's "amplified Bard" who will save
poetry by being popular.
I prefer this kind of approach:
In his intelligent, elegant and valuable defense of poetry, James Longenbach
emphasizes what poets gain by not being subject to the pressures of a
high-stakes market or mediascape. "It's difficult to complain about poetry's
expanding audience," Longenbach says, taking up Richard Howard's argument
without his caustic tone, "but it's more difficult to ask what a culture
that wants poetry to be popular wants poetry to be. The audience has by and
large been purchased at the cost of poetry's inwardness: its strangeness,
its propensity to defeat its own expectations." In Gioia's eyes, a poet who
avoids a mass audience is almost by definition arrogant, but for Longenbach
such avoidance "could also be liberating--the creation of a space in which a
poem may be pushed to extremes the culture wouldn't know how to purchase or
ignore." After all, it is because Emily Dickinson refused to cleanse her
poems of their unorthodox rhythms and rhymes, thereby preserving a "status
of seclusion and secrecy," that she and her poems are now so well-known.
Poems claim our attention, Longenbach argues, inasmuch as they effectively
resist it.
Quoted in John Palatella's essay in The Nation, which is most interesting.
http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20041004&s=palattella
(Browsed, btw, via Andrew Johnston's reference The Page,
http://thepage.name/ - always worth checking out)
Best
A
Alison Croggon
Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
Editor, Masthead: http://masthead.net.au
Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com
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