[lit-ideas] Re: American poetic scene at the beginning of 72
- From: "Steve Chilson" <stevechilson@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 13 Oct 2006 01:05:54 +0100
I don't recall ever so clearly but wasn't Mallarmé on about using poetry
to demonstrate the beauty of language? Not in the sense of the sensical
but beyond the reality of the sensical, finding meaning within the
nonsense/reality?
On Thu, 12 Oct 2006 14:59:45 -0700, "Lawrence Helm"
<lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxx> said:
> Eric: Are you saying other people agree with Mike? I was hoping he was
> just nuts. The article Robert Paul posted,
> http://www.newyorker.com/critics/books/articles/061009crbo_books1 , bears
> on
> this in regard to Hart Crane. Note on page 3 that Harriet Monroe of
> Poetry
> magazine replied to a Crane submittal "with bewilderment, 'Take me for a
> hard-boiled unimaginative unpoetic reader, and tell me how dice can
> bequeath
> an embassy (or anything else); and how a calyx (of death's bounty or
> anything else) can give back a scattered chapter, livid hieroglyph; and
> how,
> if it does, such a portent can be wound in corridors (of shells or
> anything
> else). And so on.'
>
>
>
> "The poet's reply, which is included in the Library of America volume,
> has
> become a key document of poetic modernism. Crane admitted that he was
> 'more
> interested in the so-called illogical impingements of the connotations of
> words on the consciousness . . . than I am interested in the preservation
> of
> their logically rigid significations.' What Monroe saw as nonsense Crane
> insisted was a higher kind of sense. He wrote, 'The nuances of feeling
> and
> observation in a poem may well call for certain liberties which you claim
> the poet has no right to take. I am simply making the claim that the
> poet
> does have that authority.'"
>
>
>
> This is a slightly different problem than the one Mike presents, but it
> seems to me related. Crane reserves the right to write in accordance
> with a
> design of his own which abjures logic. I don't have too much of a
> problem
> with the concept, and yet years ago I tried to like Crane's poetry and
> failed. Did his illogicality get in the way of my appreciation? Was I
> being like Harriet Monroe? I don't recall. Mike goes a step further
> than
> Crane in reserving the right to be illogical in his understanding, that
> is,
> he is insisting that his understanding need not be logically related to
> the
> poem he is reading. I have an image here of one of those modern dances.
> There is the poet dancing with his poem, and Mike dances nearby in an
> unrelated way.
>
>
>
> "Hey Mike, Is what you are doing related to that poet over there or his
> poem?"
>
>
>
> "What, are you talking to me?" Mike answers in perplexity. "What poet?
> What poem? I have my own thing going on here and you are bothering me."
>
>
>
> Lawrence
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> [mailto:lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]
> On Behalf Of Eric Yost
> Sent: Thursday, October 12, 2006 2:16 PM
> To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: American poetic scene at the beginning of 72
>
>
>
> Mike: The student reader-community came to the poem with
>
> very different cultural assumptions and symbolizations.
>
> What did Roethke intend? Who cares?
>
>
>
>
>
> We should all care and I feel like ranting about it. As
>
> Bertrand Russell noted in _The ABCs of Relativity_, if
>
> everything is relative there's nothing for it to be relative
>
> to. The student-reader community is seldom right about
>
> poetry, or to be less dogmatic here, the student-reader
>
> community has an unschooled opinion. That's why they
>
> are....students. Poetry and the traditions of poetry are
>
> important especially because they preserve cultural values,
>
> and as such they are subjects that can be taught, meaning
>
> that students are unschooled and trained teachers can
>
> correct their naive understanding.
>
>
>
> Instead of taking a cue from TS Eliot's "Tradition and the
>
> Individual Talent," contemporary poets now give us prose
>
> lineated as poetry, as generation after generation of poets
>
> was taught to abandon meter and metaphor altogether in favor
>
> of trying to write philosophy, social commentary, private
>
> diaries, and essays with a ragged right edge.
>
>
>
> Now poetry is belittled and marginalized -- no longer a
>
> force for anything in culture, except among an increasingly
>
> alienated elite who find it difficult to say just what it is
>
> they're doing, and why, to ordinary people.
>
>
>
> The politics of poetry are so vicious because the stakes are
>
> so small, as Hutchins famously said of academic politics. I
>
> mean, except as an article to read in the New Yorker that
>
> you don't even read all of because after a while you realize
>
> that it's all just the same sort of politics that you're
>
> reading the New Yorker to avoid thinking about in your own
>
> life. Instead of apprenticeship to poetry, we have an
>
> ultrademocratized easy-and-fun-for-beginners approach, based
>
> on a sense that students can never be wrong.
>
>
>
> It's not progress. It's not liberating. It's not cool. It's
>
> the tedious "old spontaneous me" of Whitman imitation. Get
>
> out the old bongo drums, snap your fingers, then walk home
>
> amid the blowing trash and waste of a million egotists who
>
> never can be wrong.
>
>
>
--
Steve Chilson
stevechilson@xxxxxxxxxxx
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