Re: [New-Poetry] Re: Crisman's Game re: Tranströmer

[Chris Lott]

On 12/27/06, Bob Grumman <bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net> wrote:
> And it is almost always easier to close read a visual poem
> than a traditional one, because of the brevity of their texts.

It's funny to hear you say that since you seemed to be somewhat
offended when I made the same point in a different way about one word
poems.

I continue to feel that most such poems are "successful" only insofar
as they leave immense latitude for the reader to make up whatever they
want to about them and to have whatever particular reaction they wish
to have that may have very little to do with the "poem" in question.
What seems to me to be lacking in such poems is exactly the stuff I
think poetry really is.

One man's close reading is another person't fiction, I guess. With an
almost endless amount of room to interpret, associate, and
contextualize, such poems are all about the reader. Which is why it
might work well for one person and not at all for another and it's not
the poem's responsibility either way, really.

You said something similar yourself about the poem "JOE" when you said
such poems were successful only if they inspired the reader in some
way (to paraphrase since I don't feel like searching your blog)... but
with but one word that inspiration is rather arbitrary (not to mention
that it takes the wind out of one's critical sails when trying to
knock the parodic knockoffs made on the list here).

To be specific, how is it a work of art to throw out a single word? Or
how is the art differentiated from all other single words? I speak
here not of coinages, for which I have much more sympathy, but about
poems like "JOE" and "tundra" --

And I'm not trying to be smart or combative, I really am puzzled.
Everything you say about a poem like "JOE" or "tundra" (which is
really ironic, in a way, since I've been in and on real tundra in some
rather interesting circumstances) is something YOU created and
assigned to it. How is that poem thus validated more than my epic poem
"O" or "carrion", both of which I could (because there is so little to
contain me :) propound upon for dozens of pages?

c