tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8052308.post4182067170881093536..comments2024-01-24T06:50:01.683-06:00Comments on Samizdat Blog: Swimming in 1937: Notes on the MetapoeticArchambeauhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17273511539172747550noreply@blogger.comBlogger8125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8052308.post-56773301171811599822012-03-27T13:56:07.984-05:002012-03-27T13:56:07.984-05:00Swedish is a perfectly rational language that I sp...Swedish is a perfectly rational language that I speak in some kind of horrible pidgin version. The Swedes are too polite to laugh when I try, but I can see in their eyes that they're waiting to joke about it later over some lutefisk.Archambeauhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17273511539172747550noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8052308.post-62344874017467413142012-03-27T12:55:36.421-05:002012-03-27T12:55:36.421-05:00Yes, I wish I could learn Swedish, because my gram...Yes, I wish I could learn Swedish, because my grampa was from there. What an honor for you to be entrusted with these poems.<br /><br />As a writer whose work is set in the thirties, I agree that it is one of the most haunted of all decades.Shelleyhttp://dustbowlpoetry.wordpress.comnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8052308.post-90893641235628463102012-03-20T10:01:02.025-05:002012-03-20T10:01:02.025-05:00Gotcha. Me, I live mostly in my head. It took me...Gotcha. Me, I live mostly in my head. It took me a long time to be okay with that.<br /><br />BobArchambeauhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17273511539172747550noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8052308.post-21797567777184399232012-03-20T10:00:09.172-05:002012-03-20T10:00:09.172-05:00It's fitting then, that the poem is dedicated ...It's fitting then, that the poem is dedicated to Kenneth Koch!<br /><br />I think the connection to Goldbarth is right, too -- he weaves different stories, and different levels of self-reflectiveness, together seamlessly in those talky poems of his.<br /><br />BobArchambeauhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17273511539172747550noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8052308.post-54127691269945674742012-03-20T07:05:26.031-05:002012-03-20T07:05:26.031-05:00I too dislike (what I perceive to be) smugness in ...I too dislike (what I perceive to be) smugness in poetry or any obvious 'lack of connection to real experience'. Yet I found this poem delightful (though I am not at all the sure the full range of its playfulness would have been evident to me without Bob's enjoyable stroll along its garden path). It plays with the the idea of meta-poetry but also remains grounded in the realm of the senses. That enviable narrative ease seems to me to be a largely American trait: Koch, or O'Hara, Padgett and more recently Goldbarth and Hoagland.Mark Granierhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09899629187771913398noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8052308.post-70518172207836695702012-03-19T22:50:18.217-05:002012-03-19T22:50:18.217-05:00it would be more accurate to say that I keep tryin...it would be more accurate to say that I keep trying to like the genre, but its individual representations keep coming up short. My roots are in the avant-garde, so I actually am sympathetic to the theories and ideas behind the post-avant, behind LangPo, behind meta-poetry and meta-fiction. I was a John Cage follower well before college.<br /><br />All of which is why I do appreciate your examination of the poem here, and the ideas behind it, such as ekphrasis.<br /><br />Where things keep falling up short, though, is that the poems don't live up to the ideas behind them. That's partly because poetry that is limited to intellectual interest doesn't reach very deep into my soma. I readily admit that my idea of poetry is that it's supposed to recreate an experience in the reader, that it needs to be something that gets under your skin, something more than just mental. So that's my bias, readily admitted. I like poetry to move me more than intellectually. I've gone so far as to write an essay or two on my own blog advocating the viewpoint that poetry written ONLY from one mode ultimately fails. It's the synergy of all aspects of life that make the poetry live, too.<br /><br />So, it's not that I don't like the genre. It's that so often poems produced by the genre disappoint.Art Durkeehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07463180236975988432noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8052308.post-81227506258441177392012-03-19T16:16:54.948-05:002012-03-19T16:16:54.948-05:00Hmmm. Sounds like what you don't like is the ...Hmmm. Sounds like what you don't like is the genre, rather than the individual example. I, personally, can't stand dogs (dear dog lovers: please do not attack me for this). So I'm not much of a judge of them. Sure, I can respect the occasional super-dog, the St. Bernard who rescues the swimmer, the clearly excellent sheep dog, or what have you. But I'm so averse to the creatures that by and large my objections to the whole lot of them preclude me from being able to say much about how one specimen is superior to others. <br /><br />BobArchambeauhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17273511539172747550noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8052308.post-267225850620667272012-03-19T15:12:52.475-05:002012-03-19T15:12:52.475-05:00Hmn. Is it possible (acceptable) to like your exeg...Hmn. Is it possible (acceptable) to like your exegesis of the poem, what you find in the poem, and yet not like the poem itself very much? That's where I find myself. I appreciate the arguments and ideas you use the poem to make, but I find myself disliking the poem for exactly the reason you use here: <br /><br />"leave off the fancy language games that some people think make poetry poetry, and stick to the referents, the real story, like the one about this boy."<br /><br />I compare in my mind this poem to one of similar length and thoughtfulness by George Seferis, and find this one pale. I'm also thinking of Tranströmer. Is it all just a matter of taste, what kind of poetry you like as a poet/critic vs. what kind of poetry I like as a poet/artist?<br /><br />Maybe I just get stuck there at that precise point of feeling suspicious of "fancy language" done mainly for its own sake, but I usually don't find meta-poetry (meta-fiction) interesting unless it's extremely well-done, or quite unlike anything else. Borges. Barry Lopez. Some of Clayton Eshleman, a little Sam Hamill, a lot of Jim Harrison. <br /><br />But what I dislike about meta-poetry when it's smug in its fanciness is exactly what I dislike about LangPo or Silliman's "post-avant": the very lack of connection to real experience, the wallowing in mental/intellectual states, the disembodiment and disconnection from what language refers to, and where language fails utterly. (I have yet to read any convincing meta-poetry involved with terminal illness or funerals, where language often fails us.) There's often a sotto voce nose-in-the-air attitude that you'd better agree that THIS is what poetry is, or we'll look down at you, metaphorically speaking. <br /><br />Granted that poetry uses metaphor by nature, yet I find haiku much more interesting than most meta-poetry, because of its immediacy, its intimacy, its silences. The big difference between haiku poets and meta-poets is that haiku poets appreciate silence, while meta-poets, suffused as they are with the fun of language play, just won't shut up. Sometimes I feel like I'm stuck in a restaurant next to a loud table of folks who don't care how annoying they are to the other patrons.<br /><br />Maybe mate-poetry is inevitable, as you say. I would submit however that it may not be inevitable for any reason other than that artists like to make art about art, because it's a form of self-knowledge, or self-understanding. Every poet sooner or later writes an ars poetica, even if they avoid labeling it that. (One of my favorites is Hamill's short "Arse Poetica," which is somewhat ekphrastic on its own.) <br /><br />What is ekphrasis after all but artists considering art? I certainly appreciate ekkphrasis, and practice it myself. Still, most of the art I produce is a response to experience, rather than a response to other art. The difference may be a just a difference in kind of dialogue: dialogue with the life vs. dialogue with art. I fully recognize that that's an intellectual distinction with permeable membranes between categories. Nonetheless, dialogue with nature and life (the girl at the seaside) seems much more vivid to me than the dialogue with other dialogues (meta-poetry). One veers occasionally towards the "let's keep our human place in nature in perspective" of Robinson Jeffers, William Everson, Gary Snyder, and other poets of that stream.Art Durkeehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07463180236975988432noreply@blogger.com