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  #11  
Unread 06-05-2021, 12:59 PM
Susan McLean Susan McLean is offline
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Fliss, I just want to make clear that I was not criticizing your intention. I think freshness is a good thing, as opposed to staleness, and that trying to capture that quality is admirable. If I sounded grouchy about it, that is just because the word has been used so often as a stick to beat formal poetry. I think of form as a container, which can hold any sort of content, fresh or otherwise. For me, the container itself has a beauty that can add to the beauty of what it contains. But what it contains is what makes it good or bad.

Susan
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  #12  
Unread 06-06-2021, 01:28 PM
F.F. Teague F.F. Teague is offline
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Thanks for this, Susan; I didn't read your post as anything ad hom. The thought of form as container makes everything clear.

- - -
General note: I've found that project and the details are here (Ashgate was sold to informa a few years ago). In sum, the author discusses the poetics of social critique as a way for poets to engage entirely with the here and now. I'd forgotten the critique bit, I suppose. That might be something else to try.

Best wishes,
Fliss
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  #13  
Unread 06-07-2021, 03:14 AM
Ann Drysdale's Avatar
Ann Drysdale Ann Drysdale is offline
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I've been following this thread, rather like Theseus in the labyrinth. I tied one end to the doorpost and set off, sword in hand, but I'm still unravelling it and I haven't got to the middle yet. No whiff of the minotaur and, so far, not even much bullshit.

I wonder if there is a single answer. There are probably as many "freshes" as there are people pondering them. You mentioned me as an example at the very beginning. I was touched by that and I feel I owe you a contribution to the argument.

Once pushed for a self-definition (at which I now cringe a little) I described myself as a "subjective realist". On reflection, it seems to me that subjectivity might be the clue to freshness. A singular eye, sending its observation to a self-oriented brain, producing work that seeks to convince others of the sudden rightness of its interpretation. That shared suddenness might startle, offend or amuse, all of which might be forms of freshness.

Or, to put it another way, the degree of freshness might perhaps depend on how far up oneself the "inspiration" is to be found.
.

Last edited by Ann Drysdale; 06-07-2021 at 03:25 AM. Reason: reinstated an "of" between "forms" and "freshness", which had slipped out unnoticed and fallen on the floor.
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  #14  
Unread 06-07-2021, 07:51 AM
Duncan Gillies MacLaurin's Avatar
Duncan Gillies MacLaurin Duncan Gillies MacLaurin is offline
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M. A. Griffiths.
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  #15  
Unread 06-07-2021, 12:09 PM
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and our Wendy Videlock
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Ralph
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  #16  
Unread 06-07-2021, 02:15 PM
F.F. Teague F.F. Teague is offline
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Thanks, Ralph; I shall take a look 8-) (glasses)

- - -
Yes, Duncan; M.A. Griffiths was mentioned, first by Julie I think, on my thread about New Formalism. I'm reading her poetry at the moment and finding a lot to enjoy :-)

- - -
Ann, welcome to this labyrinth. I'd be happy to help muck out any BS, if necessary.

I agree that there are likely to be a lot of 'freshes', which is why I added 'Fliss-' to the Freshometer mentioned by Mark Mc during his current thread on Met. I picked that up from Susan's post too.

You're welcome for the mention. You don't owe me a contribution, but I'm glad you feel you do. I like your self-definition and reflection thereon. The singular eye takes me, foolishly of course, to the Cyclops, but I peer through the sensible lenses and understand your point. I like startle, offend, amuse. The other way is interesting. Sometimes I have a sense of pulling a bucket up from a well, though contents vary. And matters may be complicated by perceptions of the poet (as I've mentioned, I've had difficulties elsewhere).

Thank you!
Fliss
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  #17  
Unread 06-07-2021, 02:51 PM
Mark McDonnell Mark McDonnell is offline
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Hi Fliss,

Like Annie, I thought it was time I chimed in here. As I said in the PM, I’m touched that you remember a poem of mine from several years ago and that it prompted you to start this discussion. At first, I did wonder if it might just be the presence of strawberries in the poem that led you to equate it with this notion of freshness, which is vague enough to mean so many different things. But then I read your first response post and saw this:

“It's possible I mean something more than I've been able to express; something about being of the moment, without reference to the Bible, myths, etc.”

This really reminded me of something I remembered Philip Larkin saying. Something which resonated with me incredibly strongly when I first read it, around the time I began to write poetry about 7 years ago.

Quote:
I write poems to preserve things I have seen / thought / felt (if I may so indicate a composite and complex experience) both for myself and for others, though I feel that my prime responsibility is to the experience itself, which I am trying to keep from oblivion for its own sake. Why I should do this I have no idea, but I think the impulse to preserve lies at the bottom of all art. Generally my poems are related, therefore, to my own personal life, but by no means always, since I can imagine horses I have never seen or the emotions of a bride without ever having been a woman or married.
As a guiding principle I believe that every poem must be its own sole freshly created universe, and therefore have no belief in ‘tradition’ or a common myth-kitty or casual allusions in poems to other poems or poets, which last I find unpleasantly like the talk of literary understrappers letting you see they know the right people.
I probably liked this sentiment for a few reasons, when I started taking poetry seriously. First, I liked its simplicity. Second, it seemed to take the nagging worry I felt at not being educated or well-read enough and turned it into something that seemed cheekily defiant and manifesto-like. I was working class, from a house with about a dozen books (plus mine and my sister’s children’s books). My university experience went by in a bit of a haze of poverty, drugs and depression and I was a father by the end of it at age 21. After that, life got very exhausting for a very long time (all is well now though). I’m still pretty ignorant of the Classics (Greeks/Romans) and I’ve resigned myself to the fact I’ll probably remain so. I couldn’t dip into the “myth-kitty” even if I wanted to, but here was Larkin saying I didn’t need to.

But mainly I loved the idea of each poem being a “freshly created universe”. All that matters is that one poem. Not where it fits in the tradition, what literary school it belongs to, who it quotes or what it alludes to. Just the precise authenticity of feeling and thought and preservation of subjective experience in arresting language. It seemed to chime with the way I was trying to write and wanted to write.

Obviously, Larkin’s ideas aren’t definitive and in fact, as I later found out having read more, are pretty divisive. It was seen by some as deliberate philistinism or as an attack on Eliot’s high modernism and the idea of intertextuality and all poetry being in conversation with the past. All that stuff. But I do remember it striking me at the time with the force of something brilliantly true, or at least brilliantly useful to me.

So, that’s my take on the freshness thing.

Last edited by Mark McDonnell; 06-08-2021 at 04:07 AM.
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  #18  
Unread 06-08-2021, 01:30 AM
Ann Drysdale's Avatar
Ann Drysdale Ann Drysdale is offline
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Oh. Oh, dear. I am so wishing I hadn't used the Labyrinth metaphor in my own post. Or at least that I'd related it to Bowie and Jim Henson, rather than...

But that's the point, is it not? We write from who we are. Reaching out to touch one another with shared insights, filing one another according to our literary, musical, cinematic and political preferences.

I did study classics at school. Did my "small Latin and less Greek", studied French, and English, Literature. As an inner-London kid I went from a junior school in Brixton to a very "posh" school in Dulwich because I'd aced the eleven-plus exam. I've been a journalist, a farmer, a ditch-gipsy and a single mum and it's all been whizzed in a life-blender till it settled-out into a mad old bat who writes poetry.

Mark and Larkin are right, but we all have our own myth-kitties. We make them up as we go along and they can divide as well as bind. They can become a kind of jargon, created to hold a group together and, as an inescapable corollary, to repel outsiders. We nudge and wink at one another, showing ours in exchange for a look at theirs.

Perhaps when, in the course of this written exhibitionism, we get a peep into something that's not in our own inner bailiwick, we are being offered "fresh". Oh, I do so hope this is true.

One of the best expressions of this thought that I have come across is an episode of Star Trek TNG. It's called Darmok and might be worth a Google.
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  #19  
Unread 06-08-2021, 03:07 AM
Mark McDonnell Mark McDonnell is offline
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Don't worry, Annie, I got the Labyrinth metaphor. If it was animated by Ray Harryhausen and shown on ITV on a rainy Bank Holiday in the 70s, then I'm OK. Ha. I don't want to come across as performatively thick, like some kind of reverse snob. That would be insufferable. And I do know a thing or two. I've been catching up.

The myth-kitty is inescapable, of course. And allusion and intertextuality in literature (and in general conversation) can be be thrilling and moving and witty and enlightening and more. But yes, I like your idea of everyone having their own myth-kitties rather than reaching for one off the peg, which has been previously approved by some group or other for some sort of cultural capital. And something feels fresh if it feels real, I think, basically.

Now let's have a long discussion about what the vague concept of "feeling real" means. Haha.

Last edited by Mark McDonnell; 06-08-2021 at 03:58 AM.
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  #20  
Unread 06-08-2021, 04:42 AM
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Ann Drysdale Ann Drysdale is offline
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Oh, let's not. I am but a figment of my own imagination and if I stop to consider what that means, I'll melt.
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