Without first saying what I think about it, I'd like to throw a particular thought out there for discussion - good auld Yay vs. Nay with whatever requisite corollaries involved in the scrum like dirty shirts. The thought is:
"Today, a poem that is not aware of itself as poetry strikes us, at best, as unevolved and at worst as crude."
Anything?
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
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3 comments:
Have to say nay.
I have nothing really to say about this statement; I find it kind of ridiculous. Or at least "crude" isn't the right word. "Unevolved" maybe, if you accept that poetry has been made into an "art" (in the sense that expository or performance poetry is an "art" in that it involves the "I" instead of simply existing on its own). Either way, why try to make grandiose statements about the state of something as amorphous as poetry. To suggest what your statement does is to suggest in some way that the very word "poetry" is sufficient in any non-semantic sense to describe what it is we're talking about.
I liken this to saying that the best photography of the last 100 years is "evolved" in a way that the current trend of "snapshot-ish" photography is not. Of course photography recognizes its own artifice; as does even this new trend, which succeeds by appealing to kitsch-sensibilities.
I don't really agree with it, either, though I would mention that I meant it to run in reverse of your photography example.
That having been said, I would ask if you think this sentiment is at all implicit - not as statement but as action - in the larger quantity of the modern poetic enterprise. I suppose this implies that I think it is - which, of course, hardly implies that I agree.
When do poems force within themselves an acknowledgement of themselves as poetry - ironically, sardonically, enthusiastically, what have you - with the key word being: force.
You did kind of lose me at the end of that first paragraph though. I suppose in this example "poetry" and "verse" are perfectly interchangeable.
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