Tuesday, April 9, 2013

hmm...


...so contemporary poetry should be infused and reinvigorated with bile, spleen, satire, realism?

"The bitter fool"


I'm not so sure about that.

For me, the basic criterion is other than adopting a social, political or psychological attitude. Other than a necessarily sober presentation of phenomena and event (realism, I guess). In fact, the idea of a general shared attitude for poem making seems odd to me. Whatever those classic guys wrote about in Rome way back then was a reflection of their world. And even they strike me as squeezed down into a conventional form of soul -- too wrapped up in boring people, boring ideas, boring shit.

There happen to be a few good poets alive today, though I doubt the article writer would have much use for them. He's too caught up in poetry-as-commentary.

There happen to be a few good poets who write things of startlement. It's about language as a way of distilling the truly surreal or beautiful or unnerving from time and time's dream. The deepest stuff of life finds a way, through the rare poet, to make language a strange dance of being.

The remarkable and laudable poem is not the one that spits, grimaces, deflates, confronts; rather it is the one, in effect, that is a questioning of being.

Satire? How trite.


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