True, Quincy, there are a few important elements in this essay.
I do agree with his comments on the LANG-PO folk:
“Language poets demand that we interrupt the poetic process so, like good post-modernists, we can acknowledge the artifice of the work of art. We forget that Coleridge's distinction between word and thing accomplished their work almost two hundred years ago. We forget that Barth and Barthelme exhausted this device in American fiction some fifteen years ago. What is more narcissistic and repetitive than making the work of art, discourse itself, the subject of the art?”
In short – wankers one and all.
And his concluding paragraph is worth repeating, and worth taking note of.
“If we forget the primacy of the Romantics' understanding of vision (as Blake says, "If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite"), American poets risk contributing to the myopia, the diminishment of the art form. The mistake of the neo- formalists, then, is the mistake of all those who believe that form has a life of its own. We read Keats's poems not because they make lovely sounds, although they do, but because those sounds are connected to perception, and those perceptions dramatize intensely the relationship between the admittedly uncomfortable contingent self and a shifting world. A poetry of fixed forms can only console; it cannot transform. The neo-formalists miss the irony of the urn's statement, "Beauty is truth, truth beauty, -- that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." If we want our poems to live, in every sense of the word, we need to know and see much more and we need to know it soon.”
I agree.
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