At Mayday [link was via Chris] Mlinko lists her senses of the requirement of contemporary poetry including these characteristics (and I paraphrase):
– words that are slanted to the heavily sensory,
– partitioning details of perception instead of holistically plotted,
– indirect telling pushed as far as possible into loose associative, obscure connections/connotations,
– harsh, intense subjective narration that is personal/stylized, anti-sensical and anti-science.
Hardly seems like a compliment.
Elegantly simple didn’t make the cut. Nor did humor. Surprising insight. Sense of inevitability. Mystic to grounded dynamic is absent. Pop culture or dissent towards political peace, not mentioned. Maybe these are universals to poetry. The distinctions can cross genres of poetry from short forms to visual to lyrical.
To say modern art is not representational isn’t to deny that it uses color.
Labels never sit well with me. Categorical statement never do either. Like the one in the sentence before this one.
And let me just state categorically my intense dislike and repudiation of “requirements” as applied to poetry! (Red rag to bull, really, as far as I’m concerned. I immediately want to rush out and make poems which subvert all “requirements” and still work.) She’d have done better to stick to the word she began with, “qualities” – which is still limiting but a little less incendiary.
as I see it
she means de facto, as observed out of the habit of practice rather than prescriptive should be.
Re: as I see it
Hmmm, yeah, OK.
I just finished telling my writers’ group:
“As I am fond of saying, whatever rules one creates for writing, sooner or later someone comes along who breaks them all – brilliantly. As I also like to say, you have to know the rules in order to break them successfully. And as I like to say, too, there aren’t really any rules in the sense of “musts”, only things that work well or not.”
i agree with your paraphrasing. she attempted to color her requirements with “very interesting”, “good”, “extreme”, “subjective”. along with “sensations” and “details” and “obscurity”, all of these made me uncomfortable.
but what’s good about this sort of thing is that it results in dialog and conversation and it makes one think about poetics, which is not a bad thing at all. thanks for posting, Pearl.
Amanda
subjective language is always tricky, makes one have to counterbalance, but then this idea of objective has its own pitfalls
yes, dialoguing about what the habits are and how they came about and how they move I think is useful.