Archive for the ‘Poetry Magazine’ Category
Entry 1471 — From an Internet Poetry Discussion
Sunday, June 1st, 2014
Another quickie today–to give me more time on my essay on Beauty, which is starting to come around!
I tend to see Poetry‘s finally getting around to accepting forms of visual poetry because, now that it has been a seriously-pursued variety of poetry for a hundred years in this country, they more or less have to. So some of them have actually given it thoughtful examination–and found to their surprise that they like a portion of it. The portion they like, will–it goes without saying, but I’ll say it, anyway–only be, in most cases, a notch above big and little but with time, and the help of young academics more able to appreciate it, they’ll come to appreciate it the way they now appreciate Pound and Joyce. By then, of course, people like us will be doing who-knowz-wot, and grumbling at the gate-keepers.
I’m in the final analysis an optimist, but it does seem to me that the Establishment now rates the American poetry of the first half of the twentieth-century fairly accurately, albeit still not giving Cummings his due, but writing about all the poets of the time worth writing about, unless there are a few as concealed as Emily was that they’ve overlooked.
With that, I may have said all I have to say on this most interesting topic.
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Entry 444 — My Latest Pop-Off
Friday, May 20th, 2011
In case the morons at Poetry don’t post my pop-off, and they haven’t yet, here is approximately what I said (unfortunately, I failed to keep a copy):
Why should anyone care what one third-rate knownstream critic has to say in praise of poetry that has been acadominant for over twenty years now (although only recently noticed by Poetry Magazine), so-called “language poetry” (which is just collections of non sequiturs with none of the significant focus on the aesthetic uses of grammar that real language poetry has) compared with what another third-rate knownstream critic has to say in praise of the kinds of poetry established long before that when there’s innovative poetry extant to explore far from the tired interests of such critics–and Poetry Magazine.
Hmmm, I think I improved it. I definitely made it nastier, out of annoyance for Poetry’s not posting it. I now think it would have been interesting to have added a challenge to Poetry and its readers to visit my infraverbal mathematical poems at Tip of the Knife or my mathematical poems at the Otherstream Unlimited Blog and tell me why they, and poems like them, don’t deserve recognition. My poems rather than anyone else’s because I feel I can argue more knowledgeably for them against the Philistines than I can for any others. But also because of my growing egocentric need to yowl for me!
Later note: my comment was posted. It was followed by a comment consisting almost entirely of a quotation of Adorno which seemed to me nothing but meaningless subjective gush.