Frederick, many thanks for the comments. You have said in a far clearer
and fluent way what goes to the essential core of a poetics I argue for
and support and have spent a good part of my life trying to think. (The
cost of this is I throw out 80 to 90 percent of what I write as
uninteresting and not worth keeping. I am not that prolific.) 

It is interesting that in terms of prose novels, historically, a poetics
of the limited lyric is also pushed and usually known as realist novels
as opposed to modernist novels. But more so, even in recent poetics this
limited lyricism is still pushed and more often in the name of a
Heideggerean poetics which in the second coming is given the name of
Derrida and Deconstruction. This is why I am so opposed to such a
poetics and consider it to be a hermeneutics of colonialism or to be
even more blunt and use Lenin's term, an imperialist hermeneutics. Or
put another way, the Heideggerean song of the Earth is an imperial first
person lyric. A song too often repeated in critical journals as
so-called critical discourse in Latin derived terms and as if the term
critical is an embarrassed silence on the journal's masthead.
Deconstruction becomes an excuse to avoid real critique in this slippery
way. (There is perhaps a real Derrida, but who reads him?)

Perhaps this is also why I find Dorothy Porter's verse novels not only
interesting but important and I would say very important in terms of
recent Australian poetics. (I will always remember Dorothy saying to the
Postmodernists critics; I am a Romantic. Think about the poet's critical
twist in terms of POV, here, and feel free to laugh.)

Anyways, I will get off me soapbox and press the send button. 

best wishes

Chris Jones.



On Sat, 2007-01-13 at 10:46 -0500, Frederick Pollack wrote:

> >
> Chris goes directly to an issue I consider crucial for my poetry and for 
> poetry generally.  I've read very little narratology, so I'll speak only in 
> my own terms.  For a poet, writing narrative is psychologically and 
> existentially different from writing lyric - i.e., it feels different, and 
> involves a different stance towards experience.  A critic, theorist, or 
> reader, looking at a work from the outside, will see more continuity.  To 
> ask which impulse (towards narrative or lyric) is primary within poets is 
> different from asking which need is greater for readers.  And to ask either 
> question in a historical vacuum creates chicken-or-egg aporias. 
> Historically, and therefore (I think) in essence, both the poetic impulse 
> and the poetic need are for storytelling.  The traditional primacy of the 
> epic results not merely from the imposed wishes of ancient, medieval, or 
> Renaissance princes but from a basic intuition: poetry should tell the tale 
> of the tribe, explain the universe, and advance values.  The kind of tales, 
> cosmologies, and values desired by the men who paid for epics may have 
> amounted to propaganda; in the hands of good poets they became criticism. 
> (I'm thinking primarily of Virgil here, but even the Nibelungenlied and the 
> Song of Roland "criticize" the bloody worlds they seem to celebrate.)
> 
> For over two centuries now, poetry has meant lyric poetry.  The ancient and 
> Renaissance hierarchy of genres was not inverted but discarded.  Yet every 
> lyric poet, writing "about" his or her own grief , pique, or ecstasy, is 
> writing in the context of a larger story, being recited by society as a 
> whole.  The tribe is always telling its own, unexamined tale, and imposing 
> it.  Today the theme of that tale is that individual and immediately 
> interpersonal experience is primary; that it alone, in fact, is real. 
> However much mainstream poets may despise Margaret Thatcher's "There is no 
> such thing as society, there are only men, women, and families," they accept 
> it in their poetic practice.  Which is why I find it increasingly hard to 
> read literary journals.  One more dead father, one more walk along the 
> beach, yet another dreadful divorce ... for me, mainstream (or workshop, or 
> magazine-verse) poets blur into one bourgeois figure, miserable but 
> comfortable.  They asume two things: 1) that however predictable experience 
> may be, sensibility is unique; 2) that if sensibility is adequately captured 
> in a style, it alone can make average experiences seem unique, important, 
> and "universal."  When they succeed, their poems suggest some timeless, 
> human truth.  But timelessness is an illusion, and humanity consists of 
> classes and ideologies in continual conflict.  The synchronic, solipsistic 
> mainstream lyric cannot encompass this fact.  All contemporary "political" 
> poems fail, because poets as poets are in flight from politics, i.e., from 
> history.
> 
> More later, perhaps, but must run. 
>