So what is it about American poets? Why are they so bloody hung up on the supposedly unbridgeable divide between those who rhyme and those who don't
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hello from across the pondandrewjthomasJanuary 23 2004, 09:42:55 UTC
i hope you don't mind me commenting here i've been wanting to post reponses to your stuff but i'm respecting the community rules i completely agree with this rant i think poetry is poetry and judging good or bad depends on how well the poet uses the tools for that poem and the content the poet is trying to convey anyway, just wanted to say that not ALL american poets are stuck in either/or mode
Pyrotechnics4got10oneJanuary 24 2004, 20:16:38 UTC
The poet uses every tool at hand. Rhyme is a challenge, but really interesting once you give it a chance. What is interesting about confessional freestyle poetry? Stream-of-consciousness ranting? Poetry is about crafting language to be precise, fluid, and honest. Poetry is about compelling the reading mind forward, feeding it measures of meter and alliteration; exposing it to metaphors, patterns, and hopefully, mirrors.
Frost, like Wordsworth, and like William Carlos Williams, expressed complex thoughts and emotions with the most simple language possible. Precise, fluid, and honest.
Want to read the "Romantic" master of linguistical pyrotechnics? Check out some Shelley, particularly Mont Blanc.
Anyway, excuse me for barging into your journal, but we Americans (yourself included, being a native) aren't all hung up upon freedom versus formality. If you were more familiar with the American poetic situation, at least as much as I am (and, really, I'm not), you'd not have supposed this. Finally, if this post was inspired by the New Formalism community, you're making a gross generalization: realize that it's comprised of an infintessimal percentage of the American literary public, and therefore not well-representative of the whole.
If you check the date, you'd see this post predates the formation of the new formalism community. In fact, this post was inspired by the criticisms of a free-verser on poetryslamming who claimed "form compromises truth and precision. the basics might be achieved, but in the process of form the benefits of free verse are lost" which is in my opinion absolute rubbish, and yet I know it is an opinion held by many in America. As in social science, the roots of this split go back 30, 40, 50 years, but I stand by my assessment that it is still prevalent today. Otherwise, why would journals such as The Formalist and The New Formalist have to exist? Of course all American poets aren't hung up this way -- one can still make generalisations about trends in schools of thought without asserting that all individuals hold identical views. I would like to see some concrete evidence of your assertion that it's comprised of an infintessimal [sic] percentage of the American literary public -- I had just this conversation with the Managing Editor of the Waywiser
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Comments 4
i've been wanting to post reponses to your stuff
but i'm respecting the community rules
i completely agree with this rant
i think poetry is poetry and judging good or bad
depends on how well the poet uses the tools for that poem
and the content the poet is trying to convey
anyway, just wanted to say that not ALL american poets are stuck in either/or mode
Reply
Frost, like Wordsworth, and like William Carlos Williams, expressed complex thoughts and emotions with the most simple language possible. Precise, fluid, and honest.
Want to read the "Romantic" master of linguistical pyrotechnics? Check out some Shelley, particularly Mont Blanc.
Reply
Anyway, excuse me for barging into your journal, but we Americans (yourself included, being a native) aren't all hung up upon freedom versus formality. If you were more familiar with the American poetic situation, at least as much as I am (and, really, I'm not), you'd not have supposed this. Finally, if this post was inspired by the New Formalism community, you're making a gross generalization: realize that it's comprised of an infintessimal percentage of the American literary public, and therefore not well-representative of the whole.
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