Entry 506 — Random Comments
A few trivial recent comments of mine just to let the curious know I’m still alive. It looks, though, like I won’t be posting much for a while, for I’ll be out of town each of the next two week-ends.
Back to Wilshberia
Here’s another definition of “Wilshberia.” I think it probably the most accurate one. All the kinds of poetry between the formal verse of Wilbur and what I consider the jump-cut poetry of Ashbery taught by more than a few English professors. So you’d have to survey English departments to pin it down, which I now believe is why I haven’t been able to define it perfectly. That and the fact that I use it without much thought–in threads where no one else is using much thought. A really good brief but not perfect definition would be simply the kinds of poetry William Logan discusses in the New Criterion.
Williphobia
Next, something from the essay on Williphobia (psychotic hatred os Shakespeare of Stratford) I’ve been trying to get done (deleted because outside the scope of the essay, but here because I don’t want to forget it): I hypothesize that mature knowleplexes, healthy or flawed, do not come into being until puberty. Before that a person’s charactation, or normal level of mental energy, is not high enough to discriminate to any extent among knowlecules (bits of data) arriving, haphazardly organized, accompanied sometimes with contradictions not recognized or dealt with when recognized. That is, everyone tends to be a Milyoop before puberty–excessively, uncritically, open to the environment. Children can and do form knowleplexes (full-scale understandings of various unified subjects), but they will be limited to daily (pre-sexual) life, and consist, understandably, mainly of early, simple knowlecules. No child will form a rigidniplex (near-insanely clung-to irrational understanding) except a rare, highly screwed-up one (such as an autistic child). Children’s main intellectual flaw is generally ignorance, not irrationality–they haven’t the charactration to be seriously irrational. (Although they are prey to enthusiplexes.)
A Visit to an Establishment Website
Now from Contemporary Poetry Review, followed by my responses to it, followed by my second thought about my response:
Five Lessons from AWP: Or, Why We Hate Poetry Readings
1) You should recite your poetry, not read it.
2) If you can’t recite your poetry, then you can’t remember your poetry. And if you can’t remember your poetry, why would anyone else?
3) A poetry recital should be a performance. Most poets read their poems in front of an audience as if they were lecturing to a group of college students. This betrays two illusions. The first is that the poetry audience is the same as a classroom of captives. The second is that the audience must indulge the poet, rather than the poet showing sufficient respect for the audience to entertain it.
4) A poem should be recited to an audience before it is ever published. This should be a part of the poet’s method of composition and revision. Our modern practice is exactly the reverse: to publish a book of poems and then read them aloud, generally for the first time, to an audience. Is it any wonder that so many poets are so dreadful?
5) Never be boring. (Many poets are boring – their poetry too.)
Response #1
1. Only a grind remembers poems in any detail. A lover of poetry’s only important concern is remembering who wrote each good one he encounters, and perhaps enough besides that to help him find it later.
2. If one can sufficiently understand a recited poem one has never encountered before fully to appreciate it,it’s unlikely to be very good.
3. Don’t be boring? What a revolutionary idea! Up there with don’t be stupid.
Response #2
Okay, said my smarter self, one good way to appreciate a poem IS to take in its spoken surface so well you can remember it (assuming, as too many do, that all poems are words only). But there are a lot of just-as-good other ways of appreciating a poem, without remembering hardly nothin’ about it.