[New-Poetry] cummings, grammaticality

[Suzanne Burns]

My housemate, who is a media studies professor at Emerson and who writes
film scripts, was looking over my shoulder as I wrote that last reply.

Her response:  Please tell your list that feature filmmaking, thanks to the
Hollywood blockbuster hegemony, is pretty dead right now, and most of the
really creative and innovative work is being done on television.  She
recommends that you watch Six Feet Under and then get back with any
contemporary poet (post-Creeley, whom she adores) who even comes close to
its emotional depth.

Her opinion is that too many contemporary poets barely skim the emotional
surface and repeat themselves a lot, and speculates that perhaps the
excesses of the "confessional movement" scared a lot of poets away from
emotional content, sending them fleeing to the fields of abstraction and
formal experiment, and who can blame them.  We both agree that sometimes
film explores an emotional depth without necessarily evoking the same
exploration on the part of the viewer ("passives"), and that reading  is
innately more meditative.

She is making brunch as I speak (good housemate!) while continuing to wonder
if poetry is even a particularly good medium for plumbing emotional depths,
given how condensed it is.  I am hauling down my Mark Doty right now to make
a counter argument to this, while she simulatanously admits that Creeley
proves her deeply wrong on that. I predict and afternoon watching DVDs and
ploughing through many books, followed by an evening spent eating tapas with
geeks and more chatter.

Posted at her request.

Suzanne
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