I think everything you say is in concord, given my own interpretations of
the terms you use. It's possible that there is no such battle, but the
thread was triggered by what sounded to me like a battle cry.
This ancient plain, when night comes on, Shakes to a ghostly
battle-blast, Since
Persia fell at Marathon. There's another famous poem (or poetic passage)
about a spectral battle, and half lines from it are popping into my head,
but I cant properly capture it...
--Uche
On Thu, Jun 24, 2010 at 8:19 AM, Mark Weiss <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Uche: I haven't been following this thread, just dipped into it yesterday,
> so forgive me if this seems out of left field.
>
> I'm not aware that there's been a formal/free-verse battle going on
> anywhere in the past several generations (not in languages I can read, at
> any rate), except in the minds of a very few neoformalists. When the topic
> comes up folks of my persuasion will talk about the difficulty of working in
> open form within the constraints of predictable rhyme and meter, but I don't
> know anyone who considers that difficulty an impossibility--Coleridge and
> Wordsworth seemed to manage it. The battle, such as it is, is between those
> who work in open and closed form. One can write closed form free verse--lots
> of people do. The distinction isn't about the techne of the poem but about
> what one expects a poem to do, what one means when one says "poem," and
> perhaps as well about different ideas about how a life may be lived. It's
> also not, I think, an argument about what "poem" has meant in the past.
>
> Best,
>
> Mark
>
>
>
>
>
> What I've been trying to do is be really careful about the distinction
>> between the formal/free-verse battle and the simple understanding that
>> there
>> is good and bad verse.
>>
>
> Announcing The Whole Island: Six Decades of Cuban Poetry (University of
> California Press).
> http://go.ucpress.edu/WholeIsland
>
> "Not since the 1982 publication of Paul Auster's Random House Book of
> Twentieth Century French Poetry has a bilingual anthology so effectively
> broadened the sense of poetic terrain outside the United States and also
> created a superb collection of foreign poems in English. There is nothing
> else like it." John Palattella in The Nation
>
--
Uche Ogbuji http://uche.ogbuji.net
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