> It can incorporate improvisational, even chance moments, but these
must be justified by an overall coherence.
Well, yes, if coherence is the norm the poem is geared to satisfy.
Geoffrey Hill, no postmodernist, on his Funeral Music: "a florid grim
music broken by grunts and shrieks". The question of whether the "grunts
and shrieks" (the noise of history outside one's window) can or should
be contained within an overall coherence is absolutely not settled for
Hill: it vexes him throughout the first few decades of his writing. It
is not a question of abandoning poetry to incoherence, but of keeping
the line in question.
Dominic
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