[New-Poetry] Capps, style, etc.

[David Graham]

Jim Finnegan's take on Ashley Capps's poem is close to mine:  it was  
a nice bit of fun, I thought, by a poet I'd not heard till very  
recently.  Frisky stuff, taking some interesting swerves with figure  
and diction.

But I've been reflecting a bit lately on one of the many fault lines  
that occurs in poetry, contemporary or otherwise.  I'm thinking of  
the distinction between plain style poetry and that which is more  
rhetorically charged--"The Red Wheelbarrow," say, versus "A Refusal  
to Mourn."  I suppose that the downside and upside of each style are  
well enough known.  And it's not as if we need to pledge allegiance  
to one or the other.  Certainly I am not willing to abandon either  
style, myself; depending on my mood, I reach for Williams or Thomas,  
often in the same hour, and in my writing life I wander this way and  
that ad lib.

But I will say that, as someone who reads a great deal of  
contemporary poetry, I am probably a bit of  a sucker for the high- 
voltage style when encountering new voices.  Maybe I am too easily  
seduced by friskiness, or too often.  That's one of my weaknesses as  
reader, probably.

But when I wade through page after page (or screen after screen) of  
decorous, even-keeled diction, poems that are perfectly unified  
tonally and well managed in their movements, I often find myself  
yearning for some rough edges, bad behavior, and even flirtation with  
all the usual no-nos (sentimentality, purple rhetoric, incoherence,  
etc.).  I've always liked Hugo's (?) remark that any poem not risking  
sentimentality wasn't doing its job.  Of course, I don't want the  
poem to *succumb* to incoherence, etc., just to do enough of a fly- 
over to raise my pulse rate above Jaded.

I've seen enough of Ashley Capps's work recently to know that she's  
someone I want to keep my eye on.  Whether or not she'll enter my  
pantheon, I don't know or care at this point.

Anyway, here's what I would propose as a good solid poem from the  
other end of the stylistic spectrum, which, after my little Capps  
fest, I found myself really savoring.

Fiction

I think of the innocent lives
Of people in novels who know they’ll die
But not that the novel will end. How different they are
 From us. Here, the moon stares dumbly down,
Through scattered clouds, onto the sleeping town,
And the wind rounds up the fallen leaves,
And somebody—namely me—deep in his chair,
Riffles the pages left, knowing there’s not
Much time for the man and woman in the rented room,
For the red light over the door, for the iris
Tossing its shadow against the wall; not much time
For the soldiers under the trees that line
The river, for the wounded being hauled away
To the cities of the interior where they will stay;
The war that raged for years will come to a close,
And so will everything else, except for a presence
Hard to define, a trace, like the scent of grass
After a night of rain or the remains of a voice
That lets us know without spelling it out
Not to despair; if the end is come, it too will pass.

--Mark Strand.  The Continuous Life.  Knopf, 1990.




========================================
David Graham
grahamd at ripon.edu

Home Page:
http://web.mac.com/drjazz/iWeb/Site/About%20Me.html

Poetry Library:
http://web.mac.com/drjazz/iWeb/Site/DGPoLibrary.html
==========================================



-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20070827/408e48c8/attachment.html