(no subject)

[proximoception]

What kind of poetry don't you like and why?

Comments

[andalus.livejournal.com]

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.

[andalus.livejournal.com]

but that's not really poetry and I know it. poetry capital-p.

do you not like certain things which actually are poetry?

[localcharacter.livejournal.com]

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.)

[grashupfer.livejournal.com]

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

[erotetica.livejournal.com]

Sylvia fucking Plath. Whine whine whine.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it's probably the kind of thing where you shouldn't be able to answer the question. Whatever you dislike you should both forget having read at once and assume isn't necessarily bad, just beyond your immediate capacities or interests. And then keep looking.

Though some things...I think everyone owes it to themself, sans apparatus, to read - some of these people. But my list of necessaries is doubtless overpersonal.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Wonder if Ashbery does! I've only heard of Bloom praising one of them, Crase.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Things that are awesome but reading them displeases me? I hope not.

Almost everything large numbers of people bother to praise is good for something - and something you can recognize. But not all of those somethings are necessary, and many are pretty blithely outclassed by works of other poets packed tight with everythings.

That said, Pound sucks.

[erotetica.livejournal.com]

Aw man I love Pound. 'The Garden' is such a nice poem to recite to yourself as you walk around the green spaces of London, feeling intensely melancholic.

[andalus.livejournal.com]

i hate being a Plath apologist but I guess I am. There's a great deal to be learned of craft from some of her work, though she clearly died way before maturity. leaving most of it flat-out unreadable. But a lot of what I know of assonance I learned from her first, so I'll always be secretly on her side.

[andalus.livejournal.com]

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?

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

For Bloom originality is never unitary. It's a spin on a football already in flight, though some spins melt the ball.

I don't think I agree, actually. Originality is very much unitary. But writers aren't just original, they're specialists in creating what will capture, hold, develop, highlight and communicate originalities. Not "here's an idea" but the activation and ramification and exhaustion of an idea to its fullest degree and furthest limits. Which is why it's kind of frightening.

Originalities are all over. Little things that are new or clever or work interestingly - even your octopus thing must be full of discussable ones. But no one reads for those, except in genre fiction (which is why genre fiction has a bad name, since it relies on small variations). Even there no one is a fan because of the variations - they want to be captured by sensual pirates or shoot space lasers or cast magic missiles at cowboys. The variations are what you talk about afterwards, the equivalent of a cigarette; or, more likely, they're what you think about when you want to break into the field, since all the work is cut out for you in a given genre except whatever gimmick will send eyes your way rather than to the other 42,000 aspirants.

[grashupfer.livejournal.com]

JA seems to like Edward Barrett. Blurbed for him anyway. I like him, too. I also adore Pavement (not as much Malkmus solo), and he seems to be Ashberried. Those two might be my 1%.

[parishat.livejournal.com]

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.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

What poems have defeated you that way?

I mostly run into trouble with poems where intelligibility itself seems to be a non-issue - the poet isn't trying for it, or can't achieve it because of mental static on their end. So I blame a human there too, for sharing if not for writing.

[whatever-being.livejournal.com]

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.

[(Anonymous)]

Jorie Graham.

ot--Lunch with Sircy in a few.

[parishat.livejournal.com]

that's me--the Graham line.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Never read a word of hers, but you're the second person to speak against her to me this week. And rumor has it she's not a very nice person?

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Blurbs or postmodern late capitalist prophecy? I wonder if the term postmodern is finally dying. Though a lot of dying things seem to live an awful long time these days.

[parishat.livejournal.com]

I'd have to disagree--from all I remember, including recent dinners together, she's a very nice person. but the poetry is impenetrable, IMHO.