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

[Mark Weiss]

I was really talking about "difficult" poetry, the kind that doesn't 
yield easily to understanding, that makes you search for how to read it.

To put this in perspective, my mother told me that when she was in 
college, circa 1939, the class read a poem by Wallace Stevens to 
universal confusion, and the professor admitted that he didn't get it 
either and almost nobody did. Yesterday's difficult art is often 
today's staple. It's clearer, maybe, in the visual arts or music. 
Pollock doesn't present particular challenges any more, and a great 
deal of once-unplayable music is now taught to teenagers in 
conservatories. The culture simply no longer finds the work 
off-puttingly strange.

The effort of learning how to read the poem can be what's most compelling.

At 11:28 PM 7/3/2009, you wrote:
>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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