[New-Poetry] Collins on clarity

[Anny Ballardini]

I do not know if I agree with James (that would be the very first time...)
we know from history that coherence is the winning card starting from Gorgias (see his rhetorical writing on Helen of Troy) up to the best lawyers /teachers /scientists, not to mention archeologists (greatest fiction writers) /priests and nuns /generals. What makes sense is what makes truth, our knowledge is based on coherence. If I am able to write in a cohesive way that red becomes blue and they are yellow, everybody will believe it to be true. 
Deconstruction is here to help but institutions are too heavy to dismantle before sunset.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: <jfq at myuw.net>
To: "NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News &amp;Views" <new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu>
Sent: Thursday, September 13, 2007 3:09 AM
Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Collins on clarity


> 
> also, something you said here got me to thinking that there's this idea of a two pole continuum on which clarity is at one end and incoherence is at the other. I think that's a false picture. I personally dislike incoherence intensely, but I don't think that that's the same think as selecting for clarity at all. or put another way, the opposite of incoherence is coherence on that spectral graph and it's a mistake to put clarity there. clarity != coherence.
> 
> On Wed, 12 Sep 2007, Bob Grumman wrote:
> 
>> One thing I find interesting about Collins's remarks on clarity is his 
>> assumption that a poem is a message.  That the poems of Wilshberia are almost 
>> never anything more than messages is a major problem with them for me. Another 
>> reaction of mine to what David quoted: I know and admire poems (some of 
>> Roethke's, for instance) that start in or near incoherence and gradually 
>> clarify, which is the opposite of what Collins favors.  Much music that I like 
>> does the same--starts as noise or close to it but eventually achieves a 
>> standard resolution.  Not that I'm against what Collins favors.  Or jittering 
>> back and forth in a poem.  The placement of clarities and their opposites in a 
>> poem is surely something to be decided on a case by case basis.
>>
>> Another thought: Collins is talking about what I'd call psychological risk; he 
>> seems not to realize that there's such a thing as aesthetic risk (which, yeah, 
>> is no doubt in some final sense a psychologica risk, but very different from 
>> what Collins is talking about).  My Poem poems seem to me pretty clear (and 
>> sometimes intimate), but unrisky.   My mathematical poems seem a great risk to 
>> me, usually.  For instance, will my graphic images come across as crude to a 
>> "real" painter?  Are the phrases I use that are intended to be gripping images 
>> banal and/or sentimental and/or pretentious?  Or incoherent.  I, for one, fear 
>> being considered incoherent, and fear more actually being incoherent and not 
>> able to recognize it.   I also fear  being too simple..
>>
>> Interesting topic.
>>
>> --Bob
>>
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