Poetry games

Ron Silliman presented a silly little poetry game the other day that I was going to simply ignore on these pages for many reasons, most of which centered on the fact that I couldn’t guess who wrote those particular poems and really didn’t care. Well, that’s a bit too flippant.

Silliman says: “We know so much about whether or not we’re going to like a poem or not based entirely on the name we see attached to it. Names flood the text with an overlay of extraneous information that it is not possible to ignore.” Of course. Familiarity breeds understanding as often as contempt. And respect breeds the benefit of the big doubt, as well as the willingness and patience to discover.

But Mike Snider in his blog today presents the best response of all that I’ve read on Silliman’s subject. To Silliman’s premise, as he understands it, that “the experience of a poem is shaped by the name attached to it or by the journal in which it appears or both”, Mike continues, “That may often be true for those of us actively involved in the pobiz, but for almost everyone else it is barking nonsense.” Be sure to read the rest. It rises above the artificial nature of Silliman’s incestuous hypothesis to reach the real world where poets too seldom go.