Quote:
Originally Posted by Mark McDonnell
Susan and Andrew (above),
But her poetry just isn't very good, and no amount of worrying whether her audience are being patronised by highbrow critics will change that.
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Hey Mark. I hear what your saying. Where her work stands on the poetry scale doesn't interest me so I wasn't commenting on that. I don't get much out of quite a lot of poetry that other people great value in so I figure to each their own and focus on what I do find powerful and try to underline that. Unless there are ideas in the poetry that I think are rotten. I wasn't *worried* about her audience being patronized. I just think the idea that the supposed caliber of her art indicates something ingenuous or fleeting in what she seems to be part of triggering in some folks suspect. I definitely wasn't responding to mostly respectful and reasoned comments in this thread here, just to be clear. I missed Walter's post which was a good one.
More importantly, is it really her style or form that makes her work unsuitable for learning from? I think if you had ten thousand students honesty try to write in what they take as her style and her form you would find quite a bit of poetry in the results. It would be based on the images, lexicon, and energy that the various individuals accessed while playing in her shoes. Neither the form or the style would have changed in any easily articulated way. I think what people are objecting to, in most of the comments outside here, are what images she finds moving, especially how common some of these images are. Like these critics, I lose the ability to be moved by too familiar of an array of image and word. Does that mean I am more sensitive to what is powerful in our Under or less so? Am I arguing for exalting the cliche? Nope. Just admitting that something is interesting in the whole picture to me and that I don't quite know what it means.