Chris Lott, who blogs Ruminate, and I traded emails. Here
is Chris’ take on things.
On
Thanks for reminding me. It's been awhile since
I looked at your site. I'll post your note on my blog tomorrow. And I may
answer that "more traditional" comment later in the week. I actually
don't think it's possible for poets to more or less traditional, only to
respond to different traditions.
I'd be interested to hear more about being more or less
"traditional." I just posted a note to some friends about your
response to a letter from
I took a pretty typical path for someone my age (early
30's) to learn about reading and writing poetry: introduced to the old masters
in high school, immediately took to writing my own poems and stories, went to
college and changed majors 100 times on the way to degrees in English Lit and
Philosophy, emphasizing "contemporary" poetry in the former and pomo lit theory in the latter. As such, I have had what I
guess to be the "school of quietude" inculcated as part of the
curriculum.
In this respect, poetry blogs are all that they are
supposed to be – were it not for following hints of threads through your site
and a number of others in the same constellation, I would remain relatively
unaware of a vast swath of poetry and poetics from the last 30 years.
Daisy
Fried's letter, and your response, interested me
because it seemed to be the clearest articulation yet of where I find myself in
relation to a lot of this new work. It also strikes me, reading through a lot
of these logs, that there seems to be a lot of vitriol towards that which isn't
new and avant-garde. Is this just a natural consequence of feeling slighted by
the academy and the teachers who influence so many when it comes to learning
what poetry is? Or is it indicative of a sense that only what is new and
experimental (excuse my lack of precision here, but I think the idea is clear
enough) can be any good? One blogger mentioned Ray Carver and felt compelled to
write a parenthetical (get out of my weblog, Raymond Carver) as if he had
committed some avant-garde sin by acknowledging someone who simply wrote some
good work out of a different tradition.
Whatever club there is that I am catching glimpses of
through these weblogs and journals may never want me as a member. I'm not sure
I could pass the "anti-tradition" check at the door, as attached as I
am to some artists that seem to receive nothing but sneering contempt at the
hands of the new elite within. I'm sure there are artists of every stripe who
want nothing to do with any work that is outside of their comfort zone – I know
I have heard the supposition that some of the poets you write about are
willfully obscure, and I have theorized myself about some artists that their
finished work is "the beginning of a poem that just needs some time put in
to be crafted into something worthwhile" – but then again, I have said the
same thing about poems that are as traditional as they come.
I guess it's disconcerting to be jarred out of one's
comfort zone when it comes to the art they love. But it is downright
disheartening to feel as if that which one loves is not just being supplemented
by another kind of beauty, but being downright beset as a relic of tradition
that is holding the art back. I have this same kind of relationship with music.
I'm a lover of a certain era of jazz. But I find myself enamored of many kinds
of music. There are some listeners who are able to cope with that,
and others that feel the same way. But there are some for whom it is not enough
to know what they love, they feel a need to degrade all that which is outside
of that set and in the process denigrate the people who believe otherwise. I
think it should be just fine to love David Pavelich and Philip Levine, or be
moved by the frustration and tension in a Carver poem one minute and admire the
subtle craftsmanship of
If kinds of poetry form a spectrum, I'd like to think that
ideally we don't have to fall in any one place. Instead we should be visible as
an absorption spectrum is in the physical world – with affinities that can and
should fall in many different areas, some singly and delicate, others clustered
and strong, but not limited to any one place, time, or type.
c
