The taste of poets, myself included, is usually pretty close to home: one likes what one finds useful for one's own craft, cares passionately for what one learns from. Adequacy in the abstract simply doesn't count, for most of us. It's not a matter of dispassionate, disinterested canon-building.
Re: "the deal": I don't see how anyone can argue with the notion that when one derives one's manner from a pre-existing body of work one begs comparison. Hell, to be so profoundly referential is to enter into public dialogue with the older work.
Re: narrative. Personally, not a problem for me, though I seem to be incapable of sustaining it for very long. I love, for instance, Koch's A Season on Earth (both rhymed and narrative). I didn't love this particular narrative.
Mark
-----Original Message-----
>From: Douglas Barbour <[log in to unmask]>
>Sent: Aug 6, 2009 10:35 AM
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: Re: "incapacity"/New Formalism
>
>I'm not so sure, Fred.
>
>I mean I see all too many 'poems' in some version of 'free
>verse' (which Pound reminds us is never 'free' to the person who knows
>what s/he's doing) that are far too prosey, & boring. In pretty well
>all the 'kinds' of poetry going.
>
>And, as I've just been reading John Newlove again (a Canadian poet of
>terrifically powerful understatement, etc, for those who've never
>heard of him), as well as a bunch of others ranging across straight
>lyric through narrative kinds to philosophical lyric, etc, I'd say
>that, if we're wiling to admit that readers out there are, in fact, as
>eclectic as writers are (& as both writers & readers committed
>'sincerely' [never know how to take that word any more] to the kind[s]
>they like), that whatever 'the deal' is, it's a rather loose
>formulation....
>
>With lots of infighting among those who are sure they know 'the
>deal'...?
>
>Hey, just look at us!
>
>Doug
>On 5-Aug-09, at 2:25 PM, Frederick Pollack wrote:
>
>> Re "should be in prose": Wordiness and padding is of course a flaw.
>> But I often see this argument applied to lines that are neither,
>> rather deliberately rich in detail, lucid, and, horror of horrors,
>> narrative. A kind of strained nervous cleverness, constantly trying
>> to invent *some meaning or response for what one is reading - this
>> readerly state, inevitable when reading Raworth or Prynne or Brian
>> Henry or Laura Moriarty or Susan Howe etc. etc., seems to be the
>> *only permissible one to advanced opinion.
>>
>> *That's "the deal."
>
>Douglas Barbour
>[log in to unmask]
>
>http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/
>
>Latest books:
>Continuations (with Sheila E Murphy)
>http://www.uap.ualberta.ca/UAP.asp?LID=41&bookID=664
>Wednesdays'
>http://abovegroundpress.blogspot.com/2008/03/new-from-aboveground-press_10.html
>
>There are as many fools in the world as there are people.
>
> Sigmund Freud
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