[lit-ideas] Re: A Sexual Approach to Poetry
- From: Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 6 Jun 2011 21:39:17 +0100 (BST)
--- On Mon, 6/6/11, Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx <Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx> wrote:
Thanks for the interesting historical comments.
> Today, poetry is classified, by McEvoy into two main
> groups:
>
> --- good
>
> and
>
> bad.
Perhaps "evaluated as either good or bad"" is better than "classified into",
but - that aside - surely, yes, the worth, merit etc. of the writing is the key
question?
I am very interested in hearing an appreciation of the poetry I have quoted;
but a kind of academic defence that explains its worth in the minutiae of some
modern poetic aesthetic, no matter how 'learned', will not prove its worth but
may in fact only prove the limitations of that 'aesthetic' and the tunnel
vision of those pursuing their 'art' in those terms: of course, the apparent
crassness and self-indulgence of language like "She is the empress of ice
cream" or "the Bishop of Uppsala...up there" _might_ be relieved by its
context, but (to me) here it is not.
The 'Bad Poetry Competition' has a serious point, as an experiment, akin to the
point that might be made where we had purported 'art' by an artist than could
not be easily differentiated from the paint splashes of an animal or the
gathering and arrangement of detritus by the typical adolescent [Emin].
Something is wrong if we cannot spot the difference: for example, between a
Dylan lyric and a sub-Dylan copy. My point is that while it might be possible
to write a piece of poetry that might be hard to tell apart from some lesser
known excerpt by a great poet like, say, Eliot, it would not be as easy to do
as it would be in the case of the examples given - and that is because we would
have to produce something of quality. If Eliot had produced "Look" I would not
catch my breath at some great new poetic development by him but assume he had
lost his poetic marbles. See.
A while back no one (particularly Eric) took the bait on whether Dylan's lyrics
count as poetry or not - perhaps rightly suspecting that any discussion would
hinge on definitions of poetry, and that might not prove worthwhile. Certainly
Dylan's use of words in song are ingredients in song and the song is a template
for a performance: and much of the nuance of those words does not arise from
them as simple 'words-on-a-page' or even as 'spoken words' but in performance,
particularly his recordings - Dylan's recordings are the exemplification of his
art, and it is typical of this art that it combines seemingly opposite feelings
and thoughts [in its recorded form on 'Freewheelin', for example, "Don't Think
Twice" is at once full of acceptance and resignation and of anger, sarcasm and
condemnation, but these varying shades of meaning and feeling are conveyed by
much more than the words or even the ambivalent title]; consequently, Dylan's
lyrics are not best
approached as 'words-on-a-page' or even as 'spoken-word' poetry, even if they
might pass muster when approached this way. Poetry or not, they are much more
worthwhile as art than the crud presented as "poetry" in my recent posts, or
some of the crud that passes for contemporary British art. Poetry such as that
quoted shows that trying to defend Dylan as poetry may also be misplaced as it
does not tell us anything as to its quality whether it is poetry or not.
The quality of Dylan's lyrics as an example will, like any example, not be free
from controversy of course but to me it is an 'objective' question that those
lyrics have a much greater quality than comparable efforts of others; this is
particularly evident when considering Dylan copyists - the Dylanisms of The
Rolling Stones' "Jigsaw Puzzle" are almost laughably naff to the extent that
Dylan of that period would never produce such a song even as a self-parodic
joke, whereas a great popular song like "Whiter Shade Of Pale" is easily
conceivable as a song from "The Basement Tapes", songs which are often full of
wit but never naff.
The abiding question, as with all works of art (and also scientific theories),
is not so much 'Is it art (or science)?' but 'What is its worth?' It is part of
developing our appreciation of art that we can and should form judgments on
this, and we can and should try to explain, if possible, why we have arrived at
those judgments: and we certainly should never be duped by the self-proclaimed
artist into assuming their product is of any special worth because it has the
stamp 'product of an artist'. If this should almost go without saying, then
dividing into "good" or "bad" is not just McEvoy or "Today".
Perhaps I should set out in detail why I think "Look" is an almost shockingly
bad poem (except we're nearly all past shocking by now), both pretentious and
facile - but I offered it without comment first: to ascertain whether any on
the list see more quality in it than I, and so to check whether criticising it
is not merely shooting fish in a barrel as far as others are concerned. Also,
as said, I am very interested to have explained why it has a worth I have
missed. I admit it starts interestingly enough and on a potentially interesting
theme, but it goes nowhere very interesting and I suspect it actually
misunderstands the role "looking" plays in the thought of those many figures
mentioned. In fact, it is deeply patronising as only the half-informed can
sometimes be -even from the start it tries to reduce the concept of a Fibonacci
sequence to merely the upshot of some merchant's counting, which is very
misplaced [like dismissing Darwinism as the
product of a mere student of worms], and throughout it fails to do justice to
those many thinkers who used the visible world to test theories about invisible
worlds behind it or otherwise used invisible worlds to explain the visible.
Instead it seems to imply these people were, unlike the poet presumably,
myopically fixated on the visible, which is certainly not true of most of them.
And then, from Fibonacci onto Mao, it lands up on some - hardly related and not
"wise" but facile - observation of the existence of unhappiness. And happiness.
See.
See what?
Donal
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