I published a poem entitled "Middle Age" a few years back that was a reaction to a poem by Robert Lowell. I had an epigraph to acknowledge that and the editor of the journal insisted I remove it. He wouldn't publish the poem if I didn't so I removed it, but I still think it wasn't the right thing to do and do not understand why he was so insistent I not acknowledge the influence of another poem and poet.

John, I've never understood the prevailing desire to cater to the elitist assholery of certain readers (real or imagined) who take offense when given info that an English Literature Ph.D. wouldn't need, but that normal people might find useful.

A curious business model, isn't it? Make as many people as possible feel excluded and intimidated by the art form we're supposedly trying to promote? And how has turning poetry into such an inside joke been working out, sales-wise, over the past century or so?

Oh, we're not going to get into "modernism has made poetry impossible for the average reader to understand, make poetry accessible again!!!!!" arguments are we? I thought such silly ideas had been put to bed years ago. If the work of understanding a poem take longer than five minutes, then at least that poem is intellectually engaging. Art has a right to be difficult, if it is truly mimetic of human experience.
Hopefully, Julie, we're not heading toward that argument, are we?

Also, judging poetry's popularity on sales figures is a very capitalist way of commodifying quality, isn't it?


Though, I will admit, I utterly agreee with you when it comes to giving information.

Actually, for me the savage impact of the “sisters” poem would be lessened if the Harjo model were mentioned. Both are long non-metrical list poems with very similar line starts. I don’t know what Harjo might think. She cut a path, another used it powerfully. Which one is “better”, I dare not attempt. There is an example in a poem by Oscar Wilde about early modern Huguenot Christian martyrs in France that closely parallels and echoes another written contemporaneously by an early modern English poet writing about something similar. I don’t have either handy this instant. Though valuable in my mind, Wilde’s seems like a kind of laudable virtue signaling; the earlier one seems much more genuine, if only because it was timely.

I'd agree - the similarity is in the structure and the visceral/imagistic quality of the language, but it didn't read like any type of homage to me, or at least any more than sonnets about love are homages to sonnets about love.

Maybe it's context - some types of structure have been so embedded in a sense of what 'poetry' is that using them ceases to be a homage and is simply a way of placing an idea in a format. Others have not, but are waiting in the wings to becoming forms/types/armatures to write within (having said that, a list poem is fairly established form, I'd have thought).

In terms of words/text working without references, I think perhaps the best poems - the really fantastically transformative ones, from my perspective, are the ones that work as a multiplicity of simultaneous storytellings - so if they're allusive and the reader 'gets' the allusion then that's great, but they also work to communicate an idea without needing to know the allusion - the allusion is just one tiny ingredient amongst many in the poem.

And readers tend to like to prove their worth as readers, too - power and agency and all that. And critics tend to like to prove their worth as critics, so if they're feeling insecure will divert to high-sounding opacities of language. And ultimately maybe reading is just about a dialogue between reader, text, and context, and the meanings shift/change depending on a multiplicity of things that will, of course, refer to other previous things because that's part of the context of both reading and making.

Too many words. Sorry.

Sarah-Jane

Ah, “high-sounding opacities of language.” Oh boy, does that speak to me. “Intertextuality,” “the male gaze,” for example in the classics. “Regression in the service of the Ego” in Freudian analytics. “Correction” in discussion of stock market nose dives. Blather. They all mean something, even something real, but as a possessor of The Male Gaze, I can’t avoid it, and, within some serious limits, would never want to, ever. I am very visual, auditory also. I would never lower my estimate of un”beautiful” people; they are only what they are, and bless them for being alive. So, since this is a non-vanishing thread, I’m on record here as a sinner, if that be a Sin (rather than an estimate, however faulty, of the bio health of my neighbors). We, you included, could do a valuable thread on academic bullshit.

Artistic difficulty is fine if it's earned, Cameron. If I have to put in the time and effort to grapple with a difficult poem or painting or musical composition, the payoff in terms of enjoyment or other impact had better be worth it.

But I was mainly discussing poets and editors with the attitude, "If you can't catch a Robert Lowell reference without help, you're not worthy to read this." I'm glad we are in agreement in terms of the utility of notes, or at least of references that people can plug into a search engine, if they feel inclined to look something up.

A reading of Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”

Ever since I first read Frost’s famous poem I have smelled something about it that to me suggests that he was thinking about some other living poet (possibly e.e. cummings) who lived in Greenwich Village. Much the same applies to Frost’s “A Considerable Speck.” Anyway, right or wrong here’s my butchered reading:

Whose *words* these are I think I know.
His house is in the *village* though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his *words* fill up with snow [frost].

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the *words* and frozen [frosty] lake [look or like]
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness [hearing reference] bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy [why “easy”?] wind [flatulence (!?)] and downy [negative opinion?] flake.

The *words* are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Deleted December 30

Well, I
think that if I
were you I
wouldn't bother.