What is Canadian Poetry?
While Canada sleeps current Canadian Poetry is being defined over at JPF's place. Have a read. It started with a few simple, harmless questions which then gave rise to many, many comments. I am not sure I understand any of it but it was fun watching from the sidelines. Feel free to add your two cents. Demand to be heard.
posted by John MacDonald at
Sunday, July 24, 2005
4 Comments:
Perhaps 'plodetry' would be a more apt word for contemorary poetics. Cleverness is not poetic, nor for that matter very clever at all. Ampersands and hypens, juxtapositions of uppers and lowers, like wormy teeth, are inane and silly. Dissonaces and incongruencies, a slight tilt and rupture of wording and complex, these are far more satisfying and eye-catching. As Heidegger said, and here I paraphrase the unparaphrasbale, the poets are the true thinkers and philosophers, all others are clever, yet fall short of the creative and genuine. To not pay tribute and homage to those who came before us, those who have allowed us a voice at all, is tragic and far too clever. There is a Bounty of recent PhD grads in philosophy who see no reason to read and study Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer et al, feeling that what they had, and still have to say, is passe and of little to middling interest. Cognitive Science, as but one example us this disconnectiveness, is rife with such clever, albeit inane jabbering. To not read Dante and Ovid, Paz and Jiminez, does not only ourselves, but those who read and listen, often times painfully, to what we have written. Milosz, Gombrowisz, Jastrun, Rozewicz, Swirszcynska, they have allowed us the freedom and honor of writing, to act as if they never existed, does a great diservice to memory, which, as you know, is the life-blood and marrow of poetry and art.
cooooool...
...and thanks for the email.
demand to be heard you say? How about taking a survey for poets by Terrain magazine then...http://www.ocotillodesign.com/terrain/survey/
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