[New-Poetry] What I witnessed

[TheOldMole]

There's no one standard for what makes a good poem, and we don't know 
we're right. Maybe Maya Angelou's flabby poetry of witness will be read 
200 years from now as the defining work of our time, and -- hard as it 
is to believe -- Aram Saroyan won't be remembered vividly. Or Ashbery, 
or Levine, or Jorie Graham

Chris Lott wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 2, 2008 at 06:07, John Jeffrey <jjeffreymail at yahoo.com> wrote:
>> -- "Now, was that applause for me, for the poem, or for the sentiments in
>> the poem? You know, applause can be so ambiguous."
>>
>> THAT is what (at least) I am talking about, that sentiment makes many people
>> raise their opinion of a poem, praising flabby, bland poems to the status of
>> "powerful" if they agree with the point of view put forward by the poet.
>
> No doubt. But the complications are obvious: bad poems can still do
> good things... and denigrating good poems because one *doesn't* agree
> with the position being taken is at least as common as artificially
> elevating them (when anyone cares at all). Then again, past a pretty
> basic level, I'm not at all sure that aesthetic appraisal-- as
> relative and individual as it is-- can really be so neatly
> disentangled from other cultural and philosophical understanding.
>
> I've only seen three poems (one of them incomplete) from this book by
> Wright, but none of them struck me as bland and flabby. On the other
> hand, I lost all credibility in not being entranced by much of O'Hara.
> And I have an inordinate number of family members who have been in the
> prison system (and some who still are) so, for reasons stated above,
> my view comes from a different place than some others. The implication
> in some of the discussion is that I should be more sensitive to
> "exploitation" because of that.. .and I think I am, but then we get
> back to the fact that even bad poems can do good things, like giving a
> problem most constantly and happily ignore even a little exposure.
>
> c
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-- 
Tad Richards
http://www.opus40.org/tadrichards/
http://opusforty.blogspot.com/

The moral is this: in American verse,
The better you are, the pay is worse.
  --Corey Ford