[New-Poetry] Re: Gilbert

[JforJames at aol.com]

In a message dated 9/1/2006 12:45:38 PM Eastern Daylight Time,  
queenmouse at gmail.com writes:

I am not  suggesting that anyone who worked with Jack did that deliberately-- 
but I  found that taking too much of his advice could easily made my work 
sound  "Jackish" even in ways I did not anticipate. Small things, like using the  
sentence fragment too much. :-)  In the end I needed to get away from  that. 
When I was finishing my Master's thesis he wanted to help me edit it,  and I  
declined the offer-- rightly I think.  
Suzzane,
I know that as a critic Jack certainly has his blindspots. I think his  great 
virtue as a critic
was that he always made people feel that writing poetry was  an important 
engagement
with the world...and one not to be taken lightly. He didn't want to waste  
his time
with poems that were conceptual in nature or pure products of the  poet's 
imagination. 
I don't think anyone who has been in workshop with a master poet is  entirely 
immune 
from falling under a kind of spell...of being tempted to write toward  that 
master's sensibility.
In Northampton, though it was nominally a peer workshop, everyone  wanted
Jack Gilbert to like his/her poem. 
 
Jack, as we all do, has his contradictions too...he seldom  expressed 
approval or amusement 
at jokey or humorous poetry. But then every so often he'd write one (most  
were not very 
 
successful, to my taste in humor); they'd generally be joke poems  couched as 
parables 
about life or art. The one that would always make me cringe went something 
like (paraphrasing here): "When I hear some people talking about  their
great loves, I think (about the joke) of two cleaning women  looking down 
from an upper floor window, watching a man run in and out  of one building after 
another, desperate to find a bathroom, and one cleaning  woman says to the 
other, 'Lordy, that man do love architecture.'"

 
Speaking of deploying a 'sentence fragment' in a poem, has anyone  noticed 
that an annoying amount of contemporary poetry is written toward complying  
with 
grammatical rules? I'm wondering if the number of young Creative  Writing 
MFAs forced 
(not at gunpoint, but for the tuition abatement or economic survival)  into 
teaching 
Composition courses is having the deleterious effect on some  of our younger 
poets,
making them more conservative in their employment of the language,  less 
likely 
to bend/break the rules of proper grammar. Likely I'm imagining this, but a  
caviling
about the use of a sentence fragment in a poem, by a poet I otherwise  
respect,
prompted me to pose this question.
 
Finnegan
 
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