[New-Poetry] for the Bob-list

[Judy Prince]

Bob, in order to avoid David's insistence upon your finding a poem in which
only 'novelty' is the necessary and sufficient condition of what you have
called a 'major' poem, you finally came up with what you consider THE
necessary condition:  freshness.  You've come up, as well, with THE
necessary condition for freshness:  'doing fresh better than anyone else'.
You'll get no debate on the need for freshness in a 'major' poem, but you
had to stop your argument at the brink of defining 'better than anyone else'
because it begs the question---that is, it throws us back onto only,
'freshness', without providing the necessary condition(s) for doing
freshness 'better than anyone else'.  My guess is that, in order to
eliminate Herrick's poem and others that've been presented to you which are
NOT the forms that you yourself use [as well as those who use the same or
other different-from-old forms], you are forced to use the word 'novelty' as
the necessary condition for 'freshness' [which is the necessary condition
for a 'major poem'].  David's won the first big round, then.
Judy

2008/12/21 Bob Grumman <bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net>

>  David Graham wrote:
>
>
>  I could make a list of techniques I consider still new in poetry--doing
> things with the color of letters, for instance, to mention a simple one, but
> I'm not up to it.  So I'll end with a request of you: post a poem that you
> think valuable that doesn't do anything new.
>
> --Bob G.
>
>
>    ==================================
>
>  So it seems to be as I suspected, that you don't acknowledge any value
> that is not related to novelty.
>
> Well, David, if you searched the New-Poetry archives (though I believe they
> are not very complete), you'd find that I acknowledge all kinds of values
> besides, let's call it "innovation."  I'm right now trying to do a
> super-full analysis of Shakespeare's "Sonnet 18," "Shall I compare thee to a
> summer's day."  My aim is to determine what makes it a major poem.  I don't
> anticipate finsing anything innovational about it.
>
>
>   Thus, when I ask you to cite an example of something "valuably old,"
> your response is to ask *me* to do so instead--presumably so you can knock
> it down.  Which confirms my original suspicion, that your phrase "valuably
> new" doesn't mean anything beyond "new."  And that novelty is your only or
> chief criterion of excellence.
>
> A poem only has two ways of being major, it seems to me: doing something
> old better than it's ever been done, or doing something new that seems (if
> only eventually) effective to poetry-lovers.  A good minor poem need not do
> either, but I'm temperamentally not able to sympathize with those who are
> satisfied to compose minor poetry.  I like lots of minor poems, even love
> some.  But it's hard for me to cheer for them when innovative poems I
> consider major are being ignored.  I concede that sometimes I am too
> negative about them.  But, hey, I got moon in Aries.  That makes me
> contentious.  I also have forty years of just enough money to scrape by and
> no recognition to speak of and hardly any hope of either, so I can get
> cranky.
>
>
>  I'm willing to be corrected on this.  All you need to do is define some
> poetic values that are not synonyms for novelty.  And concede that it is
> possible for a poem to be great without being significantly new.
>
>   Poetic values of the highest importance include what I call melodation
> for all their sound effects, metaphorical effectiveness, archetypal
> resonance, concision and clarity.  Shape on the page, color, pluraesthetic
> range (or amount of material included from other expressive modalities),
> coverage of existence (the wider and eeper the better).  A big problem with
> all this is that just about none of these things works unless fresh.  A
> metaphor may be brilliant but if it's been used by a hundred poets, it's not
> going to work.  So freshness, which is a way of being new, is a sine qua non
> of effective poetry.  Freshness can be achieved without innovation but
> innovation will always achieve it.
>
>  I don't really *need* to cite any examples, believing as I do that
> literature is news that stays news.  You just need to open any standard
> anthology and examples will swarm.  But since I am an amiable sort, I give
> you the following, which I think we could probably agree is not "new" in any
> significant sense, and was not when it was written, either:
>
>  Delight in Disorder
>
>  A sweet disorder in the dress
> Kindles in clothes a wantonness:
> A lawn about the shoulders thrown
> Into a fine distraction:
> An erring lace, which here and there
> Enthralls the crimson stomacher:
> A cuff neglectful, and thereby
> Ribbands to flow confusedly:
> A winning wave, deserving note
> In the tempestuous petticoat:
> A careless shoe-string, in whose tie
> I see a wild civility:
> Do more bewitch me than when art
> Is too precise in every part.
>
>  --Robert Herrick
>
> As I've said before, David, my taste in traditional poetry isn't much
> different from yours.  I like the above very much.  A problem, so far as our
> debate is concerned, is whether or not the poem does anything new.  I think
> a scholar of Herrick's times could detail many (minor) things he does that
> no other poet had.  As I said earlier in this post, he is most major here by
> doing what's been done, but doing it better than anyone else--or, to be a
> bit more accurate--better than just about anyone else.
>
> Related to this is the fact that the poem IS new for a modern reader.  Its
> language makes it new.  What's a "stomacher," for instance.  I would also
> say that my impression is that Herrick here comes up with an
> imagery-complex  that he may have been first to use, and uses it
> metaphorically--a woman's clothing personified--for maybe the first time in
> English poetry, or maybe the first time to this degree.  Certainly for the
> first time this well.
>
> --Bob G.
>
>
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