I guess that I'd change Pound's repetition of Eliot's observation,
that 'No vers is libre for the man who wants to do a good job,'
No verse lacks form for the poet who wants to do a good job.
I've quoted George Bowering's line on this too often here to do so
again, but... Aren't we all 'formalists' if we are managing to write
poems that work?
Doug
On 14-Apr-10, at 4:27 AM, John Herbert Cunningham wrote:
> I've been observing this site for awhile. Allow me to introduce
> myself. I am
> the host of Speaking of Poets heard Sundays from 4:30 to 5:00 p.m.
> CST on
> CKUW 95.9 FM. I regularly review poetry for a number of journals in
> Canada
> and the U.S. I also write poetry, conduct interviews, etc. I am
> intrigued by
> this notion of free verse and form being binaries placing proponents
> on
> opposite sides of the political spectrum. I believe that a
> rapprochement is
> now occurring with several poets - Anne Simpson and Elizabeth
> Bachinsky, to
> name two - are equally at home writing both experimental and formal
> poetry.
> The two named are Canadian poets. I don't know whether the same is
> occurring in either the U.S. of the U.K.
> John Herbert Cunningham
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Poetryetc: poetry and poetics
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
> Behalf Of Tim Allen
> Sent: April-14-10 5:04 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: review of the new Les Murray
>
> The trouble is Uche, it's not rot, not historically. Of course it
> wasn't the case that everyone who wrote free verse was hippy or
> leftist or whatever and everyone who wrote iambic was conservative -
> but it was the case, particularly here in the UK, that behind the
> conscious choice of writing one way or the other lay that same nexus
> of belief and life-style that lent itself to political leanings and
> ideological gestures. The perception that free verse was, by its very
> name and nature, linked to ideas of freedom and an example of that
> freedom in action, was common. So too was the notion of form as being
> conservative, anal, fussy, stuck in the past, concerned with outmoded
> ways of thinking, anti progress, anti free etc.
>
> That moment lasted in its pure black and white state for a very
> limited period - it soon morphed and became a lot more complex - but
> in many peoples' minds the opposition continued and even now you can
> pick it up in a section of the rump of surviving small-press magazines
> etc. If anything the idea lasted a lot longer in the States than it
> did in the UK - it became one of the main street-level oppositions to
> the poetry of the avant garde formalists and intellectuals.
>
> I have written before concerning the subtle shift in the ideology of
> free verse from progressive to reactionary that has taken place over
> the past 30 years.
>
> Tim A.
>
> On 13 Apr 2010, at 23:32, Uche Ogbuji wrote:
>
>> Sometimes a fool is just a fool. People who think that poetic form
>> has some
>> bearing on politics infuriate me. I have no idea how the prejudice
>> came
>> about that hippies write in free verse and that Reaganite-
>> Thatcherites write
>> in form, but I'd love to take a stick of dynamite to that rot.
>
Douglas Barbour
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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
The secret
which got lost neither hides
nor reveals itself, it shows forth
tokens.
Charles Olson
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