Tag: poetry

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Culture Other

14 line poems

Mike Snider asked ‘why do people insist on calling any 14-line poem a sonnet?’ and KSM replied at length. His argument is very reasonable. If ‘it is next to impossible for any poetry-literate reader to see a fourteen-line poem and not think “sonnet”‘, it seems a pity, since that dilutes whatever interesting distinctiveness sonnets have, but if readers really do see sonnets everywhere that battle is already lost.

 

I slightly wonder

I slightly wonder whether it’s true;
If I saw a fourteen-line poem which
was laid out in a little block on the
page, with those sonnet-y proportions,
a little bit taller than it is wide —
shaped, in fact, like a sonnet, I would
probably make the connection; even
more so if there was a little gap

to mark a notional ‘volta’ and divide
the preambulary or thetical octet
from the conclusive or antithetical
sestet; and even if the implied
sonnetesque rhetorical structure
turned out to be just white space.

 

I’m not

on the other hand
so sure
that

faced with a poem which
meandered in an irregular

wander

down the page,
I would
even
notice whether it had
fourteen lines.

If it occured to me it might,
I’d have to count them to check,
anyway.

 

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Culture

poetry dialectics

The oppositional pairs that come up in discussions of poetry – difficulty vs. accessibility, or sincerity vs. knowingness – are always discussed as though they are pressing questions for our time. But these dialectics have always been present. There have always been some poets who value innovation and others who would rather produce highly finished work in the established mode; there have always been some poets whose poems are intimate, and others who seem to hold their work slightly at arms length. The dominant style changes over time, but the tensions within it are of the same type. Looked at that way, very broad classifications like Avant Garde vs. School of Quietude look more like axes on a Myers-Briggs personality test than actual movements.

Hmm. Maybe in the morning I’ll be able to decide whether that’s a brilliant insight or a statement of the obvious.

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Culture Other

The New Sincerity

Anyone reading this who’s not up to speed on the poetry movement called the New Sincerity should start by digging around in the archives here and here.

I’ve cheerfully read the manifestos without reading any of the poems. I daresay I could find some poems by the central New Sincerists if I just dug around the web for a bit, but it would seem a pity to dilute the purity of the manifesto-reading experience. From these manifestos (manifesti?) I have learnt that the New Sincerists write poems which are sincere. I don’t think I’ve ever written a poem which was intended to be insincere; so perhaps I have been a New Sincerist (or at least a Sincerist) all along, without even knowing it.

But I wonder if a lack of insincerity is enough. The word ‘sincerity’ leads me to expect poems which are earnest, heartfelt, and, if not confessional, at least personal. I don’t think I’ve written a poem in the last few years which was about me in any important way. Most of them are things like this. Does it even mean anything to say that this poem is or isn’t sincere?

Bamiyan

The saints and rood screen
have been broken up and burnt,
the murals covered with limewash.
Only the stained-glass windows glow,
and the face of the transfigured Christ
has been scratched out
that the light might shine through clearer.

I guess I’m just trying to pin down what ‘sincerity’ means in poetry. The Romantics generally seem pretty sincere, except perhaps Byron. I’m pretty sure Milton was sincere; was Donne? Herrick? Are Shakespeare’s sonnets sincere? Is there any way of telling? Does it matter? What about Pope? Is The Dunciad more or less sincere than An Essay on Man?

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Culture Me

Why ‘Heraclitean Fire’?

The title of the blog is from the Hopkins poem That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection.

I think Hopkins makes a good touchstone for what poetry can be. His work is difficult – both linguistically experimental and intellectually abstruse – but it is always trying to communicate something. He is nothing if not sincere. And he never stops making beautiful noises.

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Culture

a manifesto

Poetry should sing.

Categories
Culture

Lyric Poetry After Auschwitz

In which I review books without actually having read them, based only on the titles. Starting with Kent Johnson’s Lyric Poetry After Auschwitz, which has been the buzz of the blogs recently.

The title is of course a quote, from (Google tells me) Theodore Adorno, who said that poetry after Auschwitz was ‘barbaric’ – though he also said that ‘literature must resist this verdict’.

So, we have a book of poetry which gets its title from a quote about poetry from a culture theorist. First deduction: this book is full of self-consciously intellectual poetry that isn’t afraid to approach its subject through a layer of heavy-handed irony.

In fact, there’s no way someone who would choose this title would be gauche enough to to use the phrase ‘lyric poetry’ in a straightforward way. It’s a further irony – the poems in the book are not in fact lyrics at all!

On the other hand, despite all the irony sloshing around the place, there are certain magic words that are too important to make light of, even for people who read cultural theorists. Theory fans are generally earnest about their politics anyway, but mentioning Auschwitz in the title means this a book of Very Serious Poetry.

The poet must have a Very Serious point to make – I’m guessing he thinks Auschwitz was a bad thing. He probably also draws in some more contemporary events as well, for topicality.

So we have non-lyrical (in fact, anti-lyrical) poetry about Auschwitz, Srebrenica, Iraq and so on. But it’s not just about the sadness of the human condition – no, it’s highly politicised. And it’s very aware of irony but has no sense of humour.

As you may have gathered, I hate this title. It’s aggressive, holier-than-thou, patronising, self-important and heavy-handed.