proximoception | (no subject)

O you have no idea. Cruising the contemporary lit mag scene in some attempt to be productive is physically grating. Nothing makes you never want to write again quite like the writing of your peers. Look over at Octopus Magazine. I've always wanted to enjoy this magazine, since it's the best-designed electronic mag out there, always attracting heavy hitters, always even-tempered, a big part of the scene from even before it opened (I remember Kris Kahn talking to me about it before the first issue, being very impressed with the editors, how it's one to watch.) But the poetry is such shit. All surrealism and artifice, masks on masks dancing on each other, the poetic equivalent of going through a particularly violent car wash.

I want someone to explain to me the ethos of this school of thought, I'm sure I'm missing something.

I don't even know how to respond to this question. The forms and sub-varieties of poetry have ramified beyond my ability to keep track, much like popular and "alternative" music. Name 10 "essential" poets and I'll probably be afraid to read 8 of them because even the basic guides or contexts present them via a barrage of insider vocabulary, which just makes me want to stay farther away. Honestly, much of the time I have no idea what your blog is talking about--but when I get it, it's good, so the fault is my own.

But I've enjoyed Fernando Pessoa, especially under his own name and as Álvaro de Campos. And I've enjoyed them precisely because I can read them without a huge critical apparatus. (My critical apparatus is only average in size, and my therapist told me not to worry so much about it anyway.)

I don't like most (99%) of Ashbery's imitators.

Sylvia fucking Plath. Whine whine whine.

this makes me wonder, what exactly is literature made of, that it can only limit itself. what is a quanta of poetry? Because no one's talking about opposites, no one's saying you can't like A and like B, which seems like it should be said -- poetry is a point of view and points of view necessarily exclude things. You can't follow Churchill and follow Stalin, it's impossible, though you can read Churchill and read Stalin. You can't follow Pound and follow Stevens. Even in the same school, I've heard it said that You can't like John Ashbery and like Frank O'Hara. but in our conception of poetry, I don't even know what to call it anymore except Bloomian, or Romantic, there are no two things so disparate that cannot be contained in a third. and the very act of reading is an assimilation of it with everything it contains and excludes. so what is the point of each individual point of view? What is a unit of originality besides currency for the poetic field?

i don't like poetry that makes me work really really hard to understand it, but then i can't, and i feel cheated and frustrated. i guess humans do that too sometimes, but with poems, i feel more defeated.

i TAed for a class on contemporary lit recently and read Susan Wheeler, whose work i didn't like at all. she was blurbed (a genre i really can't stand) as being the prophet of postmodern late capitalism or some equally inane thing, so perhaps i was already prejudiced going in.