Thursday, April 29, 2004

FormX and the Z Street Band (Boston Comment 4)

The last question in the Boston Comment roundtable: "If the avant-garde points us toward the future of the poem, describe the direction you see." Oren Izenberg's response echoes many of the notions I've been thinking as I read through this entire discussion.
As a general rule, critical and poetic partisans, bent on consolidating, celebrating, claiming or extending one tradition take note of the other (if they take note of it) just long enough to deride—and such derision is a reflexive reaction rather than an analytic one.
I've certainly been guilty of this charge on these pages in the past. I’m sorry for that. One of the positive aspects of blogging these past couple of months has been the exposure I’ve had to different personalities and beliefs much more varied than the ones in the poetic world I’ve inhabited.
The result is that poets are cut off from fully half of the history of what ought to be their art. We read less, or we think tendentiously; and so we write from less, or our writing begins with self-blinding.
I've been playing with some poems in the past couple of postings that were somewhat experimental (for me) although somewhat satirical (my feeble attempt.) I know they would neither satisfy the avant-garde nor formalist concepts of poetry, but I believe their source is a legitimate one, for me, as I look to the future of my own poetry.
If there is a wish for poetry's future in these scattered observations, it is that poets cease to nurture their shame about recurrent or perennial features of experience, and relinquish some of their terror in the face of invariances.
In a posting of Jonathan Mayhew’s concerning Thom Gunn (rest in peace), he says "My hypothesis is that meter pushes some poets into a rhetorical mode that prevents them from saying what they really want and need to say." I will agree that this will happen from time to time. But there are also other times when meter, and especially rhyme, have taken me to places where I had not known I needed to go. For these reasons and more, I believe such different modes of writing are valuable in and of themselves, and not necessarily exclusive modes for inspiration. But only in FormX shall the poet integrate the best of all worlds (he said with tongue only partially in cheek) and therefore know the future born to run.
Indeed, if there is a slogan for the “experimental” way of thinking about poetry that I have been advocating here, it isn't so much “anything goes” but rather “take it where you can get it.” And why shouldn't we be interested in thinking, wherever we find it?
"Just wrap your legs around these velvet rims / and strap your hands across my engines."


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-FormX and Spiral Dynamics (Boston Comment 3)
-FormX (Boston Comment and Indeterminacy)
-Boston Comment Question One

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