I am less interested in arguing these matters than I once was.
I remember being upset by new literary things that seemed offensive or
puerile to me. I just didn't understand them. We are afraid of what we do
not understand. It's instinctive, apparently. Get over it.
ja
http://vispo.com
----- Original Message -----
From: "Mark Weiss" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Saturday, October 22, 2011 10:54 PM
Subject: Re: Better Books, for those who can recall...
> Thanks for the ad hominem, though it misses the mark.
>
> I recently had the experience of asking the propagator of a --poetics (I'm
> not going to reveal who, it's beside the point) to explain what he meant
> by the term, as in practice it didn't seem to be anything novel except in
> the trendy naming. He told me to read his complete works, so I asked for a
> layman's abstract. It was too complicated to summarize, I was told. Wow.
> One could work up an abstract for the theory of relativity in a
> paragraph--not, obviously, the math, I'm really talking about an abstract
> for the non-specialist. In fact he had answered my question. It's not a
> matter of needing an umbrella but of shredding the meaning of the word.
>
> -----Original Message-----
>>From: Jim Andrews <[log in to unmask]>
>>Sent: Oct 23, 2011 1:38 AM
>>To: [log in to unmask]
>>Subject: Re: Better Books, for those who can recall...
>>
>>> So materialist in this sense can mean two not necessarily connected
>>> things,
>>
>>Yes, at least two not necessarily connected things.
>>
>>> something like meaning nothing other than a marker in the game of
>>> academic
>>> reputations.
>>
>>No, not necessarily.
>>
>>> The bigger problem with the term, however, may be "poetics," which seems
>>> increasingly to be attached to almost anything and descriptive of almost
>>> nothing.
>>>
>>> I'm not complaining about the practices grouped by one or another under
>>> this or that rubric (hell, in this case I participate in a lot of them),
>>> but about the violence done to the language in the quest for status.
>>
>>Well, I guess the further it gets away from what we recognize, the more
>>likely we are to say such things. Poetry is shifting toward being like
>>other
>>types of art, such as 'visual art', where what passes for visual art is
>>sufficiently diverse that there can indeed be widely divergent methods and
>>approaches within it to sufficiently wide an umbrella of issues that the
>>term 'poetics' is useful to group them together.
>>
>>ja
>>http://vispo.com
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