[New-Poetry] We're all Bozos on this bus

[Joseph Duemer]

Knott's motives may be suspect, his judgment flawed, his rhetoric over the
top, but he has written fine poems. Who knows what we have to believe in
order to do the work we do?

jd

On Thu, Apr 24, 2008 at 5:54 PM, Bob Grumman <bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net>
wrote:

>  Those who condemn something because it is new are always wrong, even when
> what they condemn turns out to be of little or no value.  That's not
> directed at Chris, who has clearly reflected on minimalist poetry and said
> more than a few intelligent things about it.  As for Knotts's blog entry, it
> may be the stupidest critique of a poet I've ever read--because to such an
> extent based on an ad hominem, and not even a good one.
>
> Question: has any school of poetry ever been attacked that the consensus of
> informed poetry-readers eventually judged worthless?  I genuinely don't know
> of any, though there have been schools that receded in importance--but were
> very influential in their time, and left a number of poem in the canon.
>
> --Bob G.
>
>
>
> David Graham wrote:
>
> "But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all
> who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at
> Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo
> the Clown."
>
>  --Carl Sagan
>
>   ========================================
> David Graham
> grahamd at ripon.edu
>
>  Home Page:
> http://web.mac.com/drjazz
>
>  Poetry Library:
> http://web.mac.com/drjazz/iWeb/Site/DGPoLibrary.html
> ==========================================
>
>
>
>
> On Apr 23, 2008, at 8:30 PM, Chris Lott wrote:
>
>   Chris, doesn't it bother you at all that when you denigrate poets like
>
> Saroyan, you sound just like the poetry-readers a hundred years ago talking
>
> about free verse?
>
>
>  Short answer: yes, it has and does bother me... particularly in this
>
> case because that wasn't quite what I was going for. When I am, I also
>
> consider that many people have slagged a lot of artists who actually
>
> were bad and whose reputations have never been rehabilitated or
>
> remarked upon and many branches of artistic creation that never turned
>
> out to be meaningful.
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
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-- 
Joseph Duemer
Professor of Humanities
Clarkson University
Weblog: sharpsand.net
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