[New-Poetry] Guided tours of the abyss

[jforjames at aol.com]

I'd hate think that sane and safe domestic lives weren't fit for poetry. I hope that's not the case. Part of the literary feminism's initiative was to allow women room to make art from subject matter presented in their domestic lives and family relations. To take away from men the ability to deem what was 'acceptable subject matter' for literature and art-making. 
 
I think with some mastery almost any life experience can be made into art, the good, the bad and ugly. In some ways the readership for the ugly is just another form of 'rubbernecking' that you get on the highway passing a bad wreck. Didn't Auden say something like confessional poets were like beggars displaying their open sores for small coins?
 
I'm very delighted when I encounter a poem that seems to emate from joy alone. It's hard to 'make a joyful noise' poem. There are many more 'funny poems' than poems that come out of pure pleasure and happy times. Easier to write those elegies of loss and grief's dirges.
 
I often think of the artist Morandi when this subject comes up. He managed to paint bottles most of his life and yet make of them something greater and more interesting than just bottles. Strange, peopleless cities one might call his still lifes. Or is that Morandi's art is interesting because his subject matter was so simple and his attention obsessively small, just paintings of bottles after all.
 
Finnegan
http://www.ursprache.blogspot.com/
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