Comments on: Writing and Failure (Part 3)

By: Bryan Markovitz

Bryan Markovitz — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 13:48:52 +0000

Now that I am surrounded by avant-garde composers in New York, perhaps I should make an opera entirely out of press conferences.
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By: Chris Piuma

Chris Piuma — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 05:18:55 +0000

What does “failing to thrive” have to do with “making a difference in one’s field”? “Thriving” would presumably involve making the field grow, I guess, or become more productive, or something, some economics metaphor or other. But “making a difference IN the field” seems to mean something else entirely, and could happen whether the field is “thriving” or not. The size of your family could be shrinking, but you could still be doing things to make a difference within your family.
Although the idea that poetry isn’t “thriving” right now seems counter-intuitive, considering the number of poets out there. But I live in a city where the poetry scene has been growing steadily in the eight years since I moved here. It is thriving for my purposes.
And I’m curious what your purposes are. What, exactly, would poetry need to be “thriving”? What, to use a military metaphor, is the litmus test that lets us know we’ve won?
Or is the sense of failure what motivates you, so that you will see it whether it’s there or not? (To use a political metaphor.)
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By: Marty Elwell

Marty Elwell — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 22:23:11 +0000

Some questions regarding Bök’s posts:
Is the purpose of poetry to obtain “cultural prestige”, “weath”, and “renown”? Has anything changed in contemporary poetry vs. the past 600 years with regard to the lives of the poets themselves, or is this a failure of perspective due to a modern definition of financial success and fame?
There are at least as many “famous”, “renown”, or “great” poets from decades and centuries past who held day jobs; died young, poor, or unknown; or lived in exile/prison as there are poets who lived long, comfortable lives on the fruits of their writing.
It’s seems like Bök’s posts equate immediate popularity and readership with greatness. Where in the equation does a poet’s ability to write poem’s with relavence that transcends time, technology, and politics get factored in? Can we judge the worth of contemporary poetry without following it through many generations of readers?
This is similar to Don’s point that we are still realizing the influences of poets like Whitman, Blake, and Dickinson, many of which the poets themselves likely never imagined.
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By: elle

elle — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 19:27:18 +0000

As a reader, I sometimes wonder when poems seem off or odd or plain just wrong, if the poet is beyond (and starting anew) and I am merely stuck in the old curve? But then again, how do you see what you can’t see? Or not suspect what appears to be a “third sex”?
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By: Don Share

Don Share — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 12:54:31 +0000

Steve asks whether we want to live in a world where revolutions are taking place constantly – but maybe we do. If you think of revolutions as being sudden and violent, well, I suppose we’d say no. But the most enduring revolutions take place gradually: his own examples of Niedecker and Clare are good ones of, precisely, this: their work is really just beginning to unfold in our own time. Dickinson, Blake, Whitman – these are revolutionaries whose work overthrew norms (and are still doing so) over long periods. Looking through old anthologies and things like the Objectivist issue of Poetry, one finds an incredible admixture and overlap of old and eventually-new styles that scarcely hint at what’s to come. So one question is how critics can be prescient, as artists sometimes can be. (Bob Archambeau recently checked out “old lit crit” with facinating results on his Samizdat blog in the post called “Ashbery ’67.”)
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By: Steve

Steve — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 01:37:43 +0000

Everything under the numeral 3, above, I can get behind. I like the analogy to abstract expressionism. Though this true aspect of innovation in the arts has allowed partisans of supposed innovation to make unanswerable claims: what looks to me like incompetence in an old style could be the start of something beautifully new, or it could be the start of something new but not especially interesting, or it could be a dead end. The only way to know is with a time machine (if then): for now, all I have is my response to what’s in front of me, plus other people’s attempts to get me to see or hear what I haven’t already seen or heard in what’s in front of me. Those attempts just are what criticism is. And not all fruitful investigations are revolutionary in any sense. I’m tempted to say that few are. (Then again, I don’t want to live in a world where revolutions are taking place constantly. Do you?)
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