The poetry blogs are suddenly full of comments about Joan Houlihan's series of essays on the "denaturing" of poetry. It's a little surprising, given how long the series has been running—I noted the sixth installment last March. Jim Behrle wonders about the same thing, and says it's fine that "we might never understand each other"—though later he writes "Our poems will eat their poems." Okey-dokey.
Now Ron Silliman is a smart guy (no, Jim, I'm not saying you're all language poets), and he's thought hard and worked hard in poetry and poetics for a long time—harder and longer than me—and today he gets it right, writing about "isms" in poetry: "The idea of poetry organized in some fashion around a common purpose necessarily implies the possibility of shared motives. That's a concept that comes more directly from French painting (& secondarily French symbolist poetry) than it does the tradition of Anglo-American letters." That's not too different from Friedrich Blowhard's post yesterday, except that Friedrich wants to do a take a do-over. So do I.
Tomorrow night will be a long video-editing session, Thursday I'm playing at a club, and Friday I drive back to North Carolina. Saturday a post about poetry I like. See you then.
7:19:45 PM 
|
