Here's the scenario: Mike exhumes to the winds a convo. with Jonathan. Jonathan sniffs, then perries. Kasey thinks Jonathan's being too poncey about the whole thing, goes in with the Panzer unit. Mike nevertheless keeps above the fray, and references two defenders of his approach, here and here.
I'll put in my two cents. I have a blog; that's what it's there for. I spent some time last year working on formalist verse. I gravitated more toward Anglo-Saxon heroic couplets than sonnets, but I have a couple of those under my belt, and in fact, have one on my revision pile right now. I don't think formalist verse has to be stuffy or demeaning to the reader's intellect. But, it can be stuffy and demeaning, just like anything can be. Maybe it even has a tendency to be: perhaps because it is the realm of greeting-card verse and little homilies suitable for cross-stitching on pillows. That's the ghetto into which the formal finds itself stuffed by the modern world. But I don't think it has to be that way.
That said, I didn't like either the Nemerov or the Espaillat poem. They were both pretty blah to me. They sank, heavily, to their bottoms. But I don't like poetry that's extreme in the other direction, either. Really disjointed langpo doesn't suit me -- doesn't make me wake up to the "music" of English, or feel somehow free to create my own response to the work. It makes me think, wow, you can use assonance and alliteration. Big whoop-de-do. I'll go read Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, thank you very much. Or, no, I won't. I'll go watch Trading Spaces. Mmm...tv. The friend that does the playing for you.
But what bothers me most is that, although he's since retreated on this position, Mike wrote that he didn't think poems should surprise him intellectually. I guess, when he talks about poetry as a vehicle for human feeling, he means that what he really requires is that the poem surprise him emotionally. But neither of these poems produces either type of surprise. About the Espaillat, the only thing that surprised me was the juxtaposition of "chips and beers" and "dead these eighteen years," which was funny, in a grotesque fashion. So maybe I'm wrong; it did surprise me, but in an "ugh, this is that crappy ghost story told with very unrealistic diction?" kind of way. I don't know about the larger cycle the poem is supposed to be part of. Is the pairing of the party food with the langorous dialogue of the host supposed to be funny? If the appearance of "chips and beers" is solely due to needing the rhyme, well, ick. That's just bad. Try again.
posted by Reen |link| 0 comments
