Ah, but Fred, until you've read the 10 volumes of the martyrology, you
can't be sure that that is all it does. I was thinking that such
tellings are another way in to the poem as narrative; in fact, in those
10 volumes, Nichol tells many stories, some of a personal nature, some
historical, some mythical, some even larger, but throughout the play of
language as a way of finding a way to tell is also central.
I admire your stories, but not all of us can, or should, do that. We
have to find our own way of making a poem.
Or, I suppose, a novel. I will admit that much SF&F is not that well
written, but I have also read some that is certainly as thick, as full
of realized characters, etc, as the literary kind. Or maybe I'm just a
fan & can't tell. Who knows?
A lot of narrative poetry of recent years just doesn't cut it when
compared, as Jed Rasula once pointed out, with the best TV series; so
then how to make a poem different enough that it does count? There are,
of course, many different ways to do this, but some LangPo (not all, I
can't read some of it) shows one way.
Doug
Doug
On 15-Jan-07, at 6:01 PM, Frederick Pollack wrote:
> But all that's by the way. "Deconstruction becomes an excuse to avoid
> real critique" - exactly. And this "excuse" pervades not only
> criticism (and "theory") but poetry itself. Doug Barbour and I have
> locked horns many times about Language poetry; he sees Susan Howe as
> important, and enjoys her work; I see in it nothing but versified
> footnotes, an academic hermeticism. In response to his quotation, from
> Kroetsch on bpNichols - "The story as fragment _becomes_ the long
> poem, the story becomes its own narrative; i.e., our interest is in,
> not story, but the _act_ of telling the story" - I have to say No.
> This kind of thinking is evasive, self-serving, pseudo-clever, and all
> too prevalent: a potentially threatening idea ("narrative") is
> verbally coopted, reduced to a meaningless buzzword, and denatured.
> The story of a story is, most likely, a weaker story than a story
> about reality; for a poem to be about its own construction does not
> make it a narrative.
Douglas Barbour
11655 - 72 Avenue NW
Edmonton Ab T6G 0B9
(780) 436 3320
http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/
Latest book: Continuations (with Sheila E Murphy)
http://www.uap.ualberta.ca/UAP.asp?LID=41&bookID=664
the words come down on
the white page a dream of snow
at mid-Atlantic.
Wayne Clifford
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