Sunday, December 29, 2013

I have little patience for...


...American poetry not influenced by German Romanticism -- from Novalis and Robert Schumann to Mahler, Thomas Mann, and W.G. Sebald. I'm sorry it has to be this way.

I have little patience for American poetry not influenced by the French Symbolists -- from Rimbaud to Mallarmé and Verlaine. I'm sorry it has to be this way.

I have little patience for American poetry not influenced by Ashkenazi consciousness -- from Kafka and Bruno Schulz to Abraham Sutzkever, Paul Celan, and Adam Zagajewski. I'm sorry it has to be this way.

Why should all that stuff from way over there be given precedence over purely American styles of experience and consciousness transposed to poetry? 

My answer is another question: what is the point of the greatest writers and poets if we, over here, don't internalize and re-manifest their spiritual, metaphysical, artistic discoveries?   

Poetry not implicitly haunted by or hued with aspects of spiritual melancholy and metaphysical irony is, in my opinion, beside the point and constitutes a shallow hectoring of the blank page.  

Suspicion should be the rule toward our stridently self-absorbed American forms of consciousness. The older, farther varieties still glow with a silver sheen of mysterious aesthetic wonder and humility.

Am I a snob? So be it. Art is a questioning of time and being, not a depository for squeaking neurosis and hyperbolized predicament.


I'm sorry it has to be this way. 



4 comments:

  1. An interesting passage I have recently read:

    "That part of a poet's soul which is unique tries to formulate its experience exactly, so that the other part, the comprehending part, may have the satisfaction of the experience. This satisfaction is shared by all men capable of empathy with the comprehending part of the poet's soul. The greater the effort of the experiencing soul to explain its 'immortal hours' to the comprehending soul, the more contagious fire there is in the poem.

    The primary poetic experience is intense yet intangible, fleeting yet haunting. The poetic urge is the inner necessity to fix it and get rid of the experience--to get rid of it through fixing it.

    Dostoevsky was a poet in this sense. Therefore he makes on his readers the demand for the same kind of empathy that the poet does. But his verbal medium is different; it is bad prose. Dostoyevsky knew he was not a master of the word; he evaded the task of versifying, but not of communication."

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    "'Modernist poets evade the issue of confrontation within themselves between him who experiences and him who comprehends. Outpouring in the raw is not comprehension, only emotional, at best."

    --Iulia de Beausobre

    (I found the tidbit on Dostoevsky fascinating; often Russians complain of his messy prose; one must look at the content, not the lyric beauty in his case.)

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    1. For me, Dostoevsky is a written force of life, a kind of vortex that sucks me helplessly into it. I can't escape the totalizing effect of the fictional worlds he created, my sense of being a ghost who is floating and observing, who is deeply attached to the goings on in his stories.

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    2. "'Modernist poets evade the issue of confrontation within themselves between him who experiences and him who comprehends. Outpouring in the raw is not comprehension, only emotional, at best."

      --Iulia de Beausobre

      I pretty much like that. Though I would qualify it by saying that the *substance* of the experience is perhaps more important than pure experiencing and later comprehending. So many poets write stuff that's not substantial enough for the reader to take notice of.

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  2. This I would agree with, regarding *substance*. In this case of this writer, who knew several great poets personally, I am assuming it was a "given" for her that a poet would be writing about a matter of substance.

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