[New-Poetry] difficult poetry

[jforjames at aol.com]

Tad, I'm not certain what Pinsky is saying is helpful. It's a slight to 99% of the poetry that is written in the world. (I was just at an open mike at a local library...so it's all too clear in my mind). Secondly, it's a likely swipe at Kooser and his ilk of poetry (folksy). But, and most importantly, it's a way for Pinsky, whom I I like and admire in may ways, to prop up 'academic difficulty'...which is different than difficulty proper. Academic difficulty means You don't read enough to get the all the references and allusions I've peppered my poem with. 
Finnegan 
 
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From: opus40-01 at opus40.org
To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
Sent: Tue, 24 Apr 2007 1:15 PM
Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] difficult poetry


Worth saying. I often quote Ciardi, from the intro to "How Does a Poem Mean?" to my students, with his analogy to a high school fottball team.



On Tue Apr 24 12:34 , 'Anny Ballardini' sent:


http://www.slate.com/id/2164823/
In Praise of Difficult Poetry
by Robert Pinsky
This time, let's take up a serious issue: the stupid and defeatist idea that poetry, especially modern or contemporary poetry, ought to be less "difficult." Should poets write in ways that are more genial, simple, and folksy, like the now-unreadable work of Edgar Guest (1888-1959)? Guest's Heap o' Livin' sold more than a million copies (in the days when a million copies was a lot), and he had his own weekly radio show. But Guest's popularity is history, while every day people still read the peculiar, demanding poems of Guest's approximate contemporaries Marianne Moore and Wallace Stevens. People still read the poems of Moore and Stevens because they don't wear out, because they surprise and entice us—and maybe, in part, because they are difficult? 



Anny Ballardini
http://annyballardini.blogspot.com/
http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome
http://www.moriapoetry.com/ebooks.html
I Tell You: One must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing star! 
Friedrich Nietzsche 


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