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Outside and Inside the Poetic Experience
Poetic form as understood from the outside, that is theoretically (using the sonnet as example): The effect of Shakespeare’s sonnet differs altogether from the effect of its content when stated in prose, because the meaning of the sonnet is rooted in a host of poetic subsidiaries* which are disregarded in the prose account of the sonnet’s content. The sonnet as a work of art is not merely enriched and altogether recast by its poetic subsidiaries; these subsidiaries also serve to cut the sonnet off from the person of the poet. —Michael Polanyi and Harry Prosch, Meaning, p. 83.Read More
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An Ordinary Reader Contra Jargon
I was going to post this as a response in the comment stream, but though it might be worth its own post. It’s a response to Seth’s comment on my earlier post below. Hello, Seth— Maybe I’m just oversensitive to theoretical language, so much so that I find the odor of it everywhere. You do, in fact, deliver a fairly jargon-free discussion of 7 lines from Joshua Beckman‘s Shake, but let me examine just one key sentence of it in the hope that I can clarify why I smell jargon there.Read More
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Dissenting from My Dissent
Well, I tried to dissent from the debate, but now Seth Abramson has yet another lengthy and thought-provoking entry on his blog, to which I want to steer this blog’s readers, in part because I generally agree with his analysis. I have two dissents, though.Read More
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Follower Twelve…
Welcome to Aaron Apps, who just joined as our twelfth “follower” (I wish we had a less loaded term for y’all) and who, according to his blog, “is putting the final touches on my manuscript Compos(t) Mentis which, if all goes well, will come out from BlazeVOX in the near future.” BlazeVOX bills itself as a “refuge” for “Post-Avant Poetries & Fiction,” so the fact that Aaron is willing to follow a curmudgeonly blog like The Perpetual Bird is both surprising and gratifying.Read More
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Revelation and Relevance in Poetry
Seth Abramson devotes two recent blog posts (here and here) to a single issue: “How to Make Poetry Relevant.” His point of departure is yet another post, this one by K. Silem Mohammed, which Abramson calls “flarfist” (not familiar with Flarf? Oh, benighted soul! See here and here [scroll down to “Feature: Flarf”], if you have the stomach for it). But Mohammed’s post seems pretty straightforward to me, and insightful to boot. For once it’s Abramson, usually so balanced and incisive, who intercepts Mohammed’s pass and takes off down field the wrong way.Read More
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Against Intellectualoids
We just returned from four days in Taos and a magical* evening at Rane Gallery. (See my earlier post on the event.) Details in a day or so, since I’m digging out from under emails and engaging in some gainful work to help pay for the trip. But first I have to record some genuine wisdom from a book I picked up during a day trip to Santa Fe at the venerable Nicholas Potter Bookseller. The book is Trial by Time, Thomas Hornsby Ferril‘s third collection of poems, published in 1944.Read More
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Poets and Their Audience
Seth Abramson, whose poems I’ve seen here and there and been very impressed by, has a new blog post that extends some previous ruminations on the question of the poet and the audience, although under the rubric of “The State of the Small Presses.” This new post it really doesn’t have much to do with the stated topic, but frankly I think that’s good: we must always begin with the poet/audience equation.Read More