Bill writes: "Ah, so here's the real question. After all, if there's room for everybody, abundance for everyone, what do we care what's going on in some distant corner?"
Actually I think the point is that, were it not for those far flung corners the entire sandbox would suffer. Historically speaking, those far corners have often enough pioneered certain techniques or views which have eventually been absorbed into the more mainstream center of the box. Case in point...Janice writes..."I play in the pretty well the whole sandbox. I write vers libre as well as formal verse in a variety of received and experimental forms, and am constantly proving new and/or unusual approaches and patterns. I dabble in surreal poetry.....". And yet many of those experimental forms that you may "dabble" in you owe to people who at one point or another took a rather theatrically extreme stand in one of the sandbox's far flung corners that earned them the opprobrium of those people playing in the center. "It'll be the death of our art" has been a cry heard throughout the centuries. No wonder it takes a more and more extreme gesture to deal the deathblow these days.
Reaction against tradition is a cyclical thing, and it serves tradition by calling it into question and thus re-fertilizing it with doubt. Radical manifesto is by its nature hyperbolic, so that once its excesses drain away what remains becomes more sand in the box.
I don't think my assessment is as unreasonable as all this outrage at particular renegades. The renegade view re-arises periodically because it is needed. And I didn't see anything in KG's interview that made it seems as if he were claiming to be anything but its latest free agent.
If KG thinks I am an asshole and doesn't not extend the same benefit of the doubt to me that I do to him, Rose, that is of no importance to me. That too is sand for the box.
Nemo
|