2004-08-10 10:08![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
digitaldiscipline
digitaldisciplineSo, I've resumed listening to NPR on my daily commute, and yesterday evening, I happened to catch a segment on an LSU professor who takes a trio of his poetry students to NOLA, where they walk around, talk to a few locals, and then write about it.
Why are poets so uniformly fucking earnest? The two (of three) poems that were inflicted on listeners both made a point of mentioning the seventeen aticles and one hundred songs the Lucky Dog vendor had released in his previous life.
There's a point at which Creative Lit teachers' insistence on concrete detail becomes bad for poetry in general, and poetry students' work in particular. My own writing prof was this way as well, despite his considerable other merits, and I intentionally put out some grotesquely bad work, ostentatiously laden with sensory details ("dead-set in their ways like their decorative railroad ties after being hammered down by a one-hundred-and-seventeen car freight train going east at twenty-three-point-four miles an hour"), just to shut him up and make a point that images alone don't make for good poetry).
Contemporary creative writing education seems to have become less about concocting an image that jabs through a reader's emotional expectations and turns too much of what is generated by modern poets (young and old alike) into little more than ascetic news briefs from their own emotional frontier. They're -serious.- They're -austere.- They Have Something To Say.
And they all sound the same fucking way when they say it. (But can say it in three languages. [/KMFDM])
My youngest sister is a Master's candidate at the University of Maine, and her area of focus is poetry, and, as far as I can tell, stypistically, her body of work is nearly indistinguishable from that of the cranky feminists of the Beat and pre-Beat period (Mitchell, etc), and much of the drier stuff that's come since (Robert Creely was her mentor at the University of Buffalo, and while Bob's a nice enough guy, his writing exists on a page like so much highly organized dry ink, at least to me). Is it good that she writes her own work with an established (and respected) flavor? I was always under the assumption that the best poetry was unlike anything else.
But two poems, nearly the same, talking about the Lucky Dog man (and nothing about the Burlesquetress)... It makes me think that everyone who's been crying about the death of modern poetry might have been onto something, if this is the kind of flat, uninspired writing that our advanced studies students are churning out like so much overfried chicken - crisp, but uniformly flavorless.
Get messy. Get sweaty. Get involved. Care. Feel. Burn.
If you ask me, composing poetry is an act of fucking the page so well that the reader needs a cigarette.
Light?
Why are poets so uniformly fucking earnest? The two (of three) poems that were inflicted on listeners both made a point of mentioning the seventeen aticles and one hundred songs the Lucky Dog vendor had released in his previous life.
There's a point at which Creative Lit teachers' insistence on concrete detail becomes bad for poetry in general, and poetry students' work in particular. My own writing prof was this way as well, despite his considerable other merits, and I intentionally put out some grotesquely bad work, ostentatiously laden with sensory details ("dead-set in their ways like their decorative railroad ties after being hammered down by a one-hundred-and-seventeen car freight train going east at twenty-three-point-four miles an hour"), just to shut him up and make a point that images alone don't make for good poetry).
Contemporary creative writing education seems to have become less about concocting an image that jabs through a reader's emotional expectations and turns too much of what is generated by modern poets (young and old alike) into little more than ascetic news briefs from their own emotional frontier. They're -serious.- They're -austere.- They Have Something To Say.
And they all sound the same fucking way when they say it. (But can say it in three languages. [/KMFDM])
My youngest sister is a Master's candidate at the University of Maine, and her area of focus is poetry, and, as far as I can tell, stypistically, her body of work is nearly indistinguishable from that of the cranky feminists of the Beat and pre-Beat period (Mitchell, etc), and much of the drier stuff that's come since (Robert Creely was her mentor at the University of Buffalo, and while Bob's a nice enough guy, his writing exists on a page like so much highly organized dry ink, at least to me). Is it good that she writes her own work with an established (and respected) flavor? I was always under the assumption that the best poetry was unlike anything else.
But two poems, nearly the same, talking about the Lucky Dog man (and nothing about the Burlesquetress)... It makes me think that everyone who's been crying about the death of modern poetry might have been onto something, if this is the kind of flat, uninspired writing that our advanced studies students are churning out like so much overfried chicken - crisp, but uniformly flavorless.
Get messy. Get sweaty. Get involved. Care. Feel. Burn.
If you ask me, composing poetry is an act of fucking the page so well that the reader needs a cigarette.
Light?
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
Dead Set in My Ways
2) Incomprehensibility in the service of art is one thing, but not incomprehensibility for its own sake.
3) Try Charles Bukowski. He'll leave enough spilled wine, blood, vomit, and semen on the floor to satisfy even you.
Re: Dead Set in My Ways
Re: Dead Set in My Ways
You should talk to