"Moves" in contemporary poetry
 

Anyone guilty of these?

http://htmlgiant.com/craft-notes/mov...porary-poetry/

The wonderful world of the MFA! Sometimes I think I actually hate poetry, usually when I read the kind of poems that this article did a wonderful job of collecting.

Sure I am.

Ending with a question is something I just did, in fact. Polysemy, particularly in the shape of zeugma, is something I really like. I'm not persuaded that these are all sins. I suspect we would find the "blank of blank" construction in lots of excellent poems if we went looking. (Dylan Thomas's "golden in the heyday of his eyes" comes to mind).

If "poetic allusion as joke" is an offense, then I'll go to hell right along with the poet who wrote "Fried Beauty." :)

Unless, as usual, there's something I'm not getting here....

Though some of those moves are almost unavoidable in poetry, I was struck by how few of them I regularly encounter in formalist poems, which have a different set of clichés. I'll admit to finding most of the moves listed in the blog to be tedious, and I would not want to read most of the poems from which they were excerpted. The free-verse poets I most enjoy reading don't tend to resort to those moves.

Susan

I think they are just "moves" that better poets use on occasion and in combination with other moves. However, if you use any of them too often they can become affectations. Editors can grow allergic to them too - e.g. I know one who dislikes non-rhyming poems that end on a rhyme.

One test is if you blush when reading any of the items in the list.

I clicked on the link with with relish, hoping for something as amusing as Twain's FENIMORE COOPER'S LITERARY OFFENCES, with its classic, understated line "Cooper's art has some defects" ;)

Alas, the compilers seem to think of themselves as "calling out" other writers over their literary devices, a tactic which would be news to people as diverse as Pierre de la Ramée and the Venerable Bede.

The whole thing would be way more fun if the compilers were having, um, more fun... ;)

Thanks,

Bill

I never did plow through the entire thing. After a while the shtick becomes forced and obvious. Pick a poem - almost any poem - and find something in the construction which, particularly when taken entirely out of context, either calls attention to itself or can be demonstrated to adhere to a certain pattern. Then wrinkle your little nose, purse your little lips, and sneer.

The main point appears to be to give the compilers a chance to show their fellow MFA's how well read and superior they are.

What an exercise in asininity:

"the use of a forest animal" ...huh? The revelation of the century! Some poets use forest animals in their poems!!! Eureka!!! They may even use the genitive (blank of blank)! Wow!!!! Maybe even together, for example: ‘the boar of the wood.’ Those poets, they aren’t as clever as we thought! Now, we know what they’re up to.

Huh?
Fr. RP

Well, it made me laugh, and I had to cop to quite a few.

Most of them fall under the category of flat line, detached cleverness,
something I often struggle with, and don't we all ? As though irony, or negation, or even wordplay, were something superimposed, rather than uncovered, or exposed. We all do Detached well enough to dissolve any free/metered divides. These guys are just listing the overused ingredients in what make up our Post Maudern soil ...

Fear of vision.

Fear of wisdom.

Fear of foolish

revelation.

Fear of witches

and magicians.

Fear of new

and ancient system.

Fear of crow,

and altercation.

Fear of slow

mastication.


-

Bravo, Wendy! Your throwaway is far better than the article that inspired it. I would, however, suggest "divelication" instead of "mastication" in the final line.