Re: [New-Poetry] An Era of DÃ(c)tente for Creative- Wri ting Programs

[Chris Lott]

I can't disagree with any of this... I'm careful always to note that
I'm not looking for traditional teaching. I just think that the best
way to bring poetry to life is by sharing poems.

Anyway, this inability to explain poems that give you pleasure makes
perfect sense. I wonder why it's a red flag to so many when that claim
is made w/r/t a poem or poet they don't like? For instance, say that a
James Wright poem gives you pleasure for some reason that you can't
explain and many in the post-avant will do their best to eviscerate
your parochialism.

Seems to me that it's a reasonable explanation and, because it is so,
negative poetics and the attempt to build one school up by tearing
another down are diseased in their heart.

It's that kind of hostility and unwillingness to accept their own
terms when it isn't self-serving that gets me pissed off and angry at
many post avant pundits. I don't like the unwritten rule that appears
to read something like "your with us or your against us" and which
apparently means I can like Eigner or Jack Gilbert, but not both... if
I do, I'm somehow sucking the soul out of new poetry and selling my
own at the same time.

c

On Fri, Jul 3, 2009 at 11:38 AM, Mark Weiss<junction at earthlink.net> wrote:
> There are poems I enjoy living with that I couldn't explain or understand in
> other terms but for some reason give me pleasure, keep me trying,
> whatever--a sense that tho I can't grasp it there's something there, an
> engendered trust in the poe,/poet. Sometimes I get the mechanics of it in
> the end. But finally a lot of poetry can't be understood in terms other than
> its own. Much of the language of critical theory attempts to deal with this,
> usually, as far as I can tell, without much success.
>
> Mark
>
> At 03:22 PM 7/3/2009, you wrote:
>>
>> On Fri, Jul 3, 2009 at 10:48 AM, Mark Weiss<junction at earthlink.net> wrote:
>>
>> > A good place to start would be the Rothenberg
>> > and Joris Poems for the Millennium, in two volumes.
>> > Don't skip the first volume, which runs to
>> > 1950--the foundations of much of what's
>> > followed is in it. And it's a lot of
>> > fun.
>>
>> I've eyed this set before. sounds like it's time to pick it up.
>>
>> Tangentially, have you (and anyone else) seen the _American Hybrid_
>> anthology? I find the area it proposes to cover-- the porous borders
>> between these poetries-- interesting, not least because I have hopes
>> it will help me figure some of this out.
>>
>> c
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