[Mark Allinson]

Thanks, Mark.

Well, from a quick glance at Silliman's ideas, it looks like a clear case of nominal determinism.



For me, there are only two types of poem - to varying degrees - cricket bats and cudgels.

Every reader knows when they hit that incoming ball with a beautifully made and balanced bat, and hear the sweet pop as it clears the boundary for a six.

And everyone knows the bone-jarring whack when the ball hits a cudgel and your hands vibrate with pain.

Everyone except the pomo-people, it seems.

How awful it must be for them to have no idea about the difference between bats and cudgels.

I almost feel sorry for them.

Almost.

[This message has been edited by Mark Allinson (edited September 20, 2006).]

[nyctom]

On the other hand, I've seen and/or read any number of formalists who trash almost every free verse poem (exceptions seem to be made for friends and/or professional colleagues). Prejudice isn't a one-way street.

It's very difficult for me to take these discussions seriously, since "pomo" is always held up as this monolith seeking to destroy everything "traditional." Some of what is universally lumped under the disbaraging umbrella term "pomo" is useful (particularly--at least for me--in explicating power relationships within a particular group or society as revealed through their language and literature) and some of it is not useful or silly.

Really, how useful are these kind of absurd reductions and blanket dismissals? What have they led to? All I see are armed camps, each one tenaciously defending its "turf."

Yawn. No wonder I stopped reading theory--pomo, mo, and premo--a couple of years ago. Life's short, you know?

[This message has been edited by nyctom (edited September 20, 2006).]

[Tim Love]

For me, there are only two types of poem ...
I'm reminded of 2 pomo vs mainstream quotes

• "As far as I can tell, there are two kinds of poets: those who want to tell stories and sing songs, and those who want to work out the chemical equation for language and pass on their experiments as poetry" - "Short and Sweet", Simon Armitage
• "We read according to an undeclared handicap system, to the specific needs of the author. We meet the novelists a little way, the poets at least halfway, the translated poets three-quarters of the way; the Postmoderns we pick up at the station in their wheelchairs.", Don Paterson, "The Book of Shadows"

[Mark Granier]

Of COURSE it isn't! I never thought that for a second. I like to believe I am open to all kinds of poetry, provided these is some element of of music, startling imagery or 'language so powerful it elbows language sideways', to quote Heaney on Hughes (hopefully more or less correctly). I have read little PoMo and LangPo stuff because everything I've read so far seems utterly flat and hopelessly hermeneutic. But I am open to suggestions.

BTW, Silliman's working on some interminable poem called 'Universe' reminds me of that character from Borges's story, The Aleph, who, drunk on his visions, is writing a poem about everything in the world. I wonder if Silliman got his idea from that story.

[This message has been edited by Mark Granier (edited September 20, 2006).]

[Tim Love]

Mark Granier: I like to believe I am open to all kinds of poetry ...
Sounds good

... provided these is some element of of music, startling imagery or 'language so powerful it elbows language sideways'
Which rather narrows the field. Even people like Holub might struggle to satisfy these criteria. I think I posted bits of
Leaving the poetry mainstream to Erato before - it suggests some sticks and carrots for those who'd like to wander. What I'd find useful are names of poets whose paths one could follow from the mainstream to pastures new. Eliot? Rich?!

[Mark Granier]

Which rather narrows the field. Even people like Holub might struggle to satisfy these criteria. ...What I'd find useful are names of poets whose paths one could follow from the mainstream to pastures new. Eliot? Rich?!

Ah, it depends what one means by 'music', doesn't it?

As my Princeton Poetry and Poetics points out, 'music and poetry undoubtedly arose in common historical sources of primitive prayer, working chants etc...' Verlaine's manifesto (which I've never read by the way) apparently urges a 'commitment to the priority of sound over sense, and is 'enjoining a more general rejection of knowledge for the sake of feeling'.

I would go some of the way with that, though I think that sense or meaning has a kind of music too, which may be what Stevens meant when he wrote 'There is no wing like meaning.' You mention Holub, one of my favourites, and his poetry may be an example of this. 'The Door', for example, with its wonderful refrain, 'Go and open the door', seems to me to have certain musical elements.

I think in much modern (as opposed to PoMo) poetry, the sound of the words, and how they work together rhythmically (if not metrically) can be intensely musical. Eliot would be a perfect example, as would Pound. More recently, Fenton and Geoffrey Hill.

I know that this may sound a bit woffly; I'm arguing on instinct more than anything. But I write what we may as well call lyrical poetry, and this is largely what I prefer to read. POMo (or what Silliman calls Post Avant) poetry seems to me to recoil from music. But not only music. It doesn't care much for imagery either. It seems to distrust its own utterances. Ah, maybe I don't know what I'm talking about. But I do think that the roots of poetry ARE music, whether we like it or not. And if the roots are still putting out little green feelers, why shouldn't we like them, in all their many forms?

As to poets outside the mainstream, well, one person's wayward brook is another's Thames Estuary. But I'd imagine that many consider Rich to be mainstream at this point. Eliot is thoroughly mainstream and, as I maintain, musical to boot. Louise Gluck? Her 'Salmon' is, I think, wonderful, but I haven't kept up with her lately.



[This message has been edited by Mark Granier (edited September 20, 2006).]