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20 Oct 09

Poetics Talks

poetictalks.blogspot.com/...welcome-to-poetics-talks.html - Preview

poetry australian literature poetic Contemporary art intertextual lyrics mímesis

instead of say, the Beats, and, here in Australia, John Tranter’s fabricated ‘generation of 68', or New York school or Language poetry, post graduate and undergraduate poetry writing students and beginners are reading Romantic and Victorian poetry again? Certainly a lot of pre-1950s poetry seems to be emulated by the younger generation here. Abounding as it is, not all of it lifts off. Kris Hemensley called these poets "exponents of a fastidiously constructed and polished lyricism current now in new Australian poetry."
Kenneth Slessor prize for poetry in the 2009 New South Wales premier's literary awards:

XYZ’s book…. “is a wonderful example of the power of the lyric to

slow time down to intense, expanded moments of seeing and feeling.In measured poems of decorum and grace, XYZ weighs beauty against terror, art against the unspeakable, love against death. The exquisite music of these poems comes from a perfect mastery of form that is never content merely to deploy traditional templates like the sonnet or the sestina, but converts them into something that is contemporary, arresting and XYZ’s own.”
20 more annotations...
- XYZ wears his/her learning lightly, gracefully: Galen (Wikipedia - a Greek physician & philosopher AD129 - but you knew that didn’t you?), Donne, Shakespeare, Kristeva, Primo Levi, Althusser – all cohabit harmoniously in a language and form that is intricate and sinuous.”
- In total effect, the book has a wonderfully coherent feel to it, as inexpressible truths are intuited or glimpsed rather than overtly stated.”
- Basically, the poetry is described in ordinary literary terminology and then approved (or, in one case disapproved and publicly edited by the reviewer) descriptively. Three of the titles here are, among other positive quality-superlatives, "impressive, fine, ambitious, finely crafted, highly accomplished with meticulously considered lines, tonal power, sustained rhythms
- How much does the concept of the new Aussie lyric have to do with formalism?
  
  How different is this new Aussie lyric from the earlier notion of lyric as an instrument of personal expression?
- Could the new lyrical engage with notions of authenticity (originality/faking), appropriation (copying) involving the persona of the poet ?
- they seem to completely ignore the unconventional and outright weird elements in a lot of the poetry and just come away with a kind of boring lowest common denominator poetic.
- one problem with crafting is that once the poem has reached a certain state of craftedness it convinces the poet that its good - when they might have been better off putting their energy into a new poem .. theres also the question of whats being achieved .. if its verisimilitude, i think thats a mistake
- Elizabeth Bishop was right when she said in an angry letter to Lowell that she would rather be the fourteenth best American poet than the best ‘female poet’.
- And why does it have to be Australian? For instance, a poet like Judith Bishop seems to me to have more in common with Jorie Graham (and at times even European poets like Celan) than with other female Australian lyric poets; likewise, I know that in my own work I am responding largely to the work of the American poets I grew up reading rather than the generation of ’68 which I read relatively late (and enjoyed) but who have had little tangible influence (reactionary or otherwise) on my own poetics
- the interest in the lyric lies in its often uncanny address and its origins in music. Indeed, as far as I am concerned, the defining characteristic of the lyric is its apostrophe, and therefore its potential to elide time and history with the intimacy of its address.
- I am also disappointed that recent reviews in the ALR (does two make a trend?) have been grouping female poets (or should I say poetesses?) for no other reason than, well, they are female.
- gnoring all the weirdness of the Rom and Vic eras: think of Dickinson and EB Browning) can produce poems that strain towards a kind of historically-sedative acceptability
- In such works, ‘representation’ applies equally to museum-piece versions of literary eras, and to a (fake) transparency between world and voice (or reality and vision, to riff on some of those judging comments). Michael hints at this with the word ‘verisimilitude’.
- they generate very careful objects, highly controlled objects, where ‘form’ goes little further than ‘surface aesthetic’. Form as a tidy-all. Of course, the most exciting poems are ALL about form
- eople still get cranky when asked to explore the relationship between words, ideas and things. Some writers will never see a poem AS a thing, or as an object of art, subject to the currents of social and economic value. Frankly I find such textured readings exhilarating, not scary or academic. Why? Because they give poetry more options. And many more players. If a poem can be lots of different things, then I’m interested.
- then it’s quite possible people will begin to reject a politics of difference and departure, in favour of an art of sameness and arrival.
- Enter: the good ol’ polished lyric, hammered out under the eyes of the mentor, who is interested (consciously or not) in legitimating their own lineage. The model of powerful mentor and multiple acolytes has been reproduced dozens and dozens of times in poetical history
- a distinction between sincerities, if you will. I was thinking of George Oppen and his kind of sincerity, one that was open to the social and political, as having a social consciousness, as opposed to a ‘trust me as I express my true feelings’ kind of approach to sincerity.
- Zukofsky wrote that sincerity is the expression, posture or intent behind a poetics attuned to the "accuracy of detail" or that that "writing occurs which is the detail, not mirage, of seeing, of thinking with things as they exist". So, I take it he is talking about the ‘now’.
- There'll always be people younger and smarter than you who will sometimes make you feel a bit of a retard. Then again there are always people who seem to want to reinvent the wheel (or pretend the wheel never happened - like they do over here in the UK).

19 Oct 09

Poetics Talks

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23 Jun 09

"The Second Coming" and "A Vision"

www.yeatsvision.com/Secondnotes.html - Preview

William Butler Yeats poetry analysis poetic estética history

Yeats had written in 1900 that: ‘It is only by ancient symbols, by symbols that have numberless meanings besides the one or two the writer lays an emphasis upon, or the half-score he knows of, than any highly subjective art can escape from the barrenness and shallowness of a too conscious arrangement, into the abundance and depth of Nature. The poet of essences and pure ideas must seek in the half-lights that glimmer from symbol to symbol as if to the ends of the earth, all that the epic and dramatic poet finds of mystery and shadow in the accidental circumstances of life’ (‘The Philosophy of Shelley’s Poetry’, E&I 87).