POETICKS

ASIDE: a poetry critic’s highest duty, after defining what poetry is with maximal possible objectivity and detailedness–neutrally, is to describe with maximal possible objectivity and detailedness a school of poetry, neutrally, with a neutral description of maximal possible objectivity and detaliedness of at least one poem representative of that school.  Valuable but secondary would be a description of the school (and poem’s) relationship to prior and contemporary schools and poems.  The ideal poetry critic would describe all schools of poetry.

Evaluation is an imprtant part of a poetry critic’s function, as well.  Seemingly very subjective but I’m working on the possibility that (a reasonable degree of) objectivity is possible.  Also (relatedly) that there are absolute statements that can be made as to what a superior poem is.  One is: “A superior poem uses a minimum number of words to achieve its aesthetic purposes.”  A counter to that I immediately thought of was a dramatic poem depicting a garrulous man; wouldn’t it have to be garrulous?  Probably.  Still, I say that it would use a minimum number of words (and other elements, I just remembered to add) to achieve its aesthetic purpose (or purposes), in this case, the depiction of a garrulous man. The poet would have to use more words, for instance, to tell us about the man’s feelings about a flower than he would have to express his own poet’s feelings about the same flower, but in the former case, in an effective poem, his extra words would convey his feelings about the man, not the flower, and he would use as few extra words as possible to get across his portrait.  Similarly, a free verse poet may use fewer words to convey his view of a flower than a formal poet would writing about the same flower–but the formal poet’s extra words might be necessary for his great ambition of telling us about the flower and making some metrically or in some other melodational way pleasurable.

The poet’s challenge here is to balance a great number of maximums–a maximum of freshness of diction, say, with a maximum of clarity.  In the preceding example, a maximum of verbal music with a maximum of concision.  A proper evaluatory poetics would list all the maximums needed, then ordain that a poem was effective to the degee that it came close to having these maximums.  I think they could be given different weights; a maximum of methphoric interest should rate higher than a maximum of melodational effectiveness, for instance.

All this is tentative, brainstorming more than anything.

It occurs to me that one would use the list on a case by case basis.  Use it for a single given poem, determine what the poem does, then from that a hierarchy of maximums.  A Dylan Thomas’s poems seem in general to be intended more than (the English versions of) Basho’s haiku to have verbal music and less to be aiming for maximum conciseness.

About the numbers in yesterday’s cryptographiku: they indicate how many spaces to indent each of the numbered words.  In the proper version of the poem, where each such word lines up with respect to the bottom line indicates part of the coded text secreted in the poem.

Now one of my memorable epigrams, a new one although the message is same old same:

If a distinguished critic condemns your poem in print, worry; if it were any good, he’d never have been aware of its existence

Something I may have discovered when skimming the 2009 issues of Poetry that a friend gave me: if Poetry is any indication, Iowa Plaintext Poems are no longer 90% de rigueur in Poetry Establishment magazines.   The school whose poems are based technically mainly on the jump-cutting of “The Wasteland” (or is that “The Waste Land?”) with extra surrealistic automatic writing thrown in a la Ashbery seems number one now.  Peculiar, because just a few years ago, it looked like Poetry was setting up as the nation’s champion of accessible poetry.

While annoying the estabniks at New-Poetry with my criticism of the Rothenberg/Joris anthology for not inculding all the kinds of poetry I think should be in it, I got to thinking about the kind of anthology American poetry most needs.  It would, needless to say, include all the schools of poetry extant.  School being group of people producing work that adheres to my definition of poetry and is significantly different from the poetry produced everywhere else.  Determining whether a group qualifies as a school would, of course, be subjective.  I have ideas on how to set up the project so as to minimize this defect:

(1) Assuming there’s lots of money behind the effort, and there would have to be, appoint one person First-Editor.  He could be almost anyone–perhaps someone selected from names in a hat of people voluteering for the position  Allow him to name all the schools that should be in the anthology and select works to represent each school.  Hire people to get permissions for their publication.  Post the result on the Internet and publicize it as widely as possible.

(2) Solicit critiques of Version 1 of the anthology.  Try to get people to say what’s missing and why, what is in and shouldn’t be and why.  Pay everyone posting a critique of value $1000, a critique of value being what a panel of ten randomly chosen from the volunteers previously mentioned and including First-Editor change the anthology because of.  Give $10,000 to the ten best critiues in the view of the panel, or to as many that deserve it if less than ten seem especially good.

(3) Make the person writing the best critique, according to the panel, Second-Editor and require him to revise the anthology, but not make any changes not recommended by one or more of the critiques of value.

(4) Repeat step (2), then (3) and so on, back and forth until just about everyone agrees that the anthology truly covers the entire poetry continuum.

The Internet makes a project like this feasible for the first time.  If the government or the Macarthur morons choosing mediocrities to call geniuses or like dolts really cared about poetry, they’d back it.   It’s as neutral as can be, it seems to me.

Reflecting on the above idea, I thought to myself that I’d be pretty good at listing the schools of pluraesthetic poetry such as visual poetry and mathematical poetry, but not too good at listing the schools of standard poetry–the poetry I call linguexpressive (using words only).  I decided to try to make a list of the latter, anyway.  Here it is:

1. Edwardian poetry–the kind of standard formal poetry written by most American poets as the twentieth century began.

2. some school between the above and the next?

3. imagistic poetry

4. country poetry, the kind Frost would be the exemplar of–and, yes, I need a much better name for it.  Quotidian subject matter, formal techniques

5. surrealistic poetry

6. plaintext poetry (the kind of which Williams would be the exemplar)

7. objectivist poetry (if that’s different enough from 5.)

8. neo-formalist poetry

9. language poetry

10. infraverbal poetry

11. New York School poetry

12. beat poetry

13. ethnic poetry

14. contra-genteel poetry (Bukowski, and his followers)

15. feminist poetry

16. Haiku

17. Neo-Hopkins Poetry–what Dylan Thomas wrote at his best, sord-splash, not the sprung rhythm.

Additons welcome.  I know I’ve missed some, almost certainly one or more important ones.