Stephen,
This speaks to my own sense of things marvellously.
Much here you (and others, no doubt) can expand.
I hope it goes wide and far as it already goes deep.
Best from Max
(currently wondering whether my poetry-teaching years did just a little to
disseminate a few poems of Wordsworth and co. and even help along the very
few students who might open themselves to contemporary poetry...)
On 24/6/08 12:47 PM, "Stephen Vincent" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Sometimes I read a lyric poem - singular or serial - and I am struck by two
> contrary reading experiences. On one hand, I am taken by a poem's structure,
> the attention of the poet, the technique, tone, etc, - how forcefully these
> combinations impel themselves on to the page. I am totally present with the
> process, and the momentary totality of the poem's object, its presence. I am
> with it - which means to say its particulars have become an assured presence
> within the immediate horizons of my take (world) as a reader.
>
> Yet, on the other hand, the poem(s), no matter how solid its occurrence in my
> imagination, critical presence, etc. is soon gone, particularly as I move on
> to the works of others, or shift my awareness to, say, the television, the
> inevitable perk and threnody of the news, its repetitions and cycles.
>
> And, in terms of the lyric poem as an experience in reading - no matter how
> present it was - - becomes such a fleeting thing without much bearing on
> what's left of either my private or public space. What is that that 'thing'
> that caught me and then flew by? Why does much work - much of it good, and,
> certainly, labor intensive - fly by with but a transitional, momentary effect?
> Whatever act or frame could make that pleasure more concrete, an enduring,
> significant presence, a constantly returnable project & gift?? (Perhaps,
> obviously. that is part of the poet's job, too).
>
> I suspect we know that's the job of a critical community - to maximize the
> public presence and circulation of a work or works. To review a person's work,
> to secure (ideally) our attention. And, no doubt, the importance of academic
> institutions. To insist students write critical papers, memorize, and/or
> improv new works off the work of others - to insure that a work secure a
> place, a point of memory in the young, as well as older persons. And, for
> those of us outside institutions, to resist and confront the the sense of
> erasure that inevitably haunts those of us who live, read, write and work not
> 'at the margins', but in locations that require a different sense of critical
> reception and measure.
>
> Without this surrounding labor of critical community, so many often
> extraordinarily fine lyric poems - let alone larger forms. - end up fleeting
> around, or become paralysed in a kind of statuary limbo. They may vibrantly
> appear in a small publication, then disappear as readily. For the poet it
> takes a fierce stubbornness to put up with can appear as an almost instant
> annihilation or a perennial sense of being 'not quite dead on arrival.'
>
> The reason I write this is that I became quite aware of this condition whitle
> reading some quite fine books that have come my way to review. Recent
> intriguing good works by Peter Manson, George Albon, Joseph Noble, Tyrone
> Williams, Tim Atkins - all guys (I realize), but, indeed, a mix of sexual,
> ethnic and national persuasions, yet each (most at mid-life, I think) working
> various lyric, experimental edges. They are among many, obviously both men
> and women, out in the field of combatting limited attention to their
> work,each working the language to scrape out (sing, whatever), a non-
> familiar truth in fresh, demanding and/or startling ways. As I begin to write
> these various or combined reviews I remain struck by the ambition and struggle
> to make a work find its location in a contemporay landscape that is mostly
> either oppositional or,most likely. oblivious to an enterprise that - as both
> poet and reader - I, if not most of us, totally support.
>
> Proportionately, without wanting to sound one bit self-piteous (because the
> work can bring such joy and critical pleasure) Sisyphus might appear to have
> had it relatively good! In this nation (USA), where Executive (Cheney. Bush.
> etc.) management has done nothing but produce a national paralysis of the
> imagination (it's nasty girim and impotent, to be both obvious and frank).
> Without sounding like a 'draino liberal' (I hope), I think its absolutely
> essential to do whatever we can (in community, critcially, creatively, etc.)
> to vigorously support the efforts of both poets and poems (lyric and
> otherwise) to continue to rise and take hold in the public realm - and take
> form in the pleasure and combat of that. Otherwise we be in for a long,
> thirsty time! So yes, I am writing my reviews. You, too?
>
> Stephen Vincent
> _http://stephenvincent.net/blog/
> Where, if you have missed it so far, you can still visit my travels with
> Charles Olson - and then some - in the Yucatan.
>
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