[Jim Moonan]

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"absolutely the last thing I want to is to turn this thread into a Robert Frost demolition derby"


Good! That's already been done over on Musing on Mastery board.

This thread will go on, or not go on, without Frost. I’ve never seen his poetry or his life as being bucolic or devoid of darkness. It is the darkness between the lines that has always kept my attention.

But, go on.

(and thanks for the clips)

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[Yves S L]

She had some sisters vs She had some horses:

For me, the whole trick of the Jorjo poem is the structure as a variation of the "let's just write some great lines, sometimes cohering, sometimes not, poem", of which the Ghazal might be a family member.

In Jazz, quotation is all out in the open, and is a basic means of communicating a shared musical history (a list of jazz standards that is supposed to be common knowledge). To me, literature and poetry, in particular, is split into so many disparate lands, that is is very very easy, for someone to read a book that someone else hasn't (which is why I don't care that much about intertextually and whatnot because retaining memory of words is not that high up on my list of acts of cognition even though it is high up in the list of academic training and is one of the ways used to express such training).

Reading the poems side by side, I was disappointed that Vishnoi could not find her own structure. I have always reckoned if you want to be a poet, then be born Irish or Indian because you would have (1) a rich sensory/cultural environment, (2) such a large storehouse of emotionally rich symbolism sequenced within a vibrant history of many upheavals, (3) a heavy historical emphasis on a literary culture, (4) a religious backdrop which adds to (2). Therefore a poem that is meant to be a homage to Indian poets, taking the structure of another poem from another tradition, it is not doing it for me, especially when the topic is so close to the hearts of Indian female poets (the events might still be in living history).

When is a homage not a "steal": it comes down to the personal ethics of the poet doing the homage, and the personal ethics of the person reading the poems. I like doing riffs, and I can riff from the level of the phrase (how a particular noun-adjective pair work) up to the level of architecture (how the poem is structured, moves, turns), so to me it is rare that I see anyone doing anything original just because the patterns I see are fine-grained, but I have always been happiest when I have come up with a nice pattern of my own, and happiest when that pattern is architectural because finding continually surprising phrases is a dead-end endeavor.

The Vishnoi poem is not a bad poem: it is just a poem that has already been "done". But, for me, a lot of poems have been "done".

I reckon credit should always be given!