----- Original Message -----
From: "sharon brogan" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Saturday, July 12, 2008 6:24 PM
Subject: Re: another snap -- July 11, 02008
> Frederick,
>
> I value your opinions very highly, so I am asking for more. Is this your
> sense of much, or most of my work? Is this poem particularly bad, or has
> it
> just tipped you into speaking?
>
> Somehow I think that knowing this will help me decide how to approach your
> critique, how to think about it.
>
> You have touched on something that I've been concerned, but uncertain
> about
> before.
>
>
>
Sharon, this question is hard to answer because the only earlier poem of
yours in my inbox is your 4th of July poem. (Don't take that personally; I
had something like 5000 messages and I recently cut them down to 2000.) All
I can give is a vague impression, and those are unfair; one should be able
to cite lines and passages. With that proviso I have to say yes; my
impression of your work is that it makes the reader look at you (the "I")
rather than providing an image-world he or she can inhabit. Let me stress
that this is an extremely widespread shortcoming. Many poets spend their
entire careers talking ABOUT their grandparents, parents, childhoods,
marriages, divorces, children, politics, gardens, etc. They do so with more
or less wit or soulfulness, more or less fresh metaphors and stylistic
economy. They criticize each other, and perhaps improve, in style alone,
never aware that there is any deeper issue. And there are many readers who
enjoy, or even recognize, no other form of poetry. Such readers want to
feel, Oh I've been there; the same thing happened to me; I really feel I
know her, etc. But as far as I'm concerned, these predictable agonies and
ecstasies and this sentimental pseudo-relationship aren't poetry; they're
Oprah. At the level, not of style, but of inspiration, what makes poetry
poetry is 1) One tries to go beyond one's comfort-zone (which includes one's
comfortable lifelong griefs). To probe the unconscious until one is truly
scared of what one emerges. Baudelaire: "Au fond de l'abime de trouver le
nouveau." That "new" is what counts, for oneself and the non-Oprahish
reader. 2) One renounces the most pervasive ideology of our society and of
ordinary language: the assumption that there is a Private Life - of
"personal feelings" and immediate relationships - distinct from the big
"abstract" world of politics, history, science, etc. In reality, reality is
ONE thing. It contains one's least admissible dreams, other galaxies, the
future, hydrangeas, etc. etc. As Forster said of prose, the point is to
connect - but more relentlessly, rapidly, and bravely than prose can. The
paradox of Mainstream poetry, which is all I'm accusing you of writing, is
that on the one hand it's narcissistic, even solipsistic - it assumes that
one's tsurris (Yiddish: pains, troubles) and petty epiphanies are
interesting. But on the other it's utterly timid; it confines itself to the
narrowest ghetto of insight and subject-matter. I recently encountered two
reviews that praised two different poets for being "humble." I don't think
good poetry or poets are ever humble. I'm not.
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