Comments on: Kneejerk poetics

By: Galee

Galee — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 08:45:26 +0000

Poetry is a lover’s whine

By: Doodle

Doodle — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 15:12:36 +0000

Poetry is madness without the madman.

By: Don Share

Don Share — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 19:30:13 +0000

I digress from the original ironizing intent of this thread, lost weeks ago, anyhow, to address the quotation above from O.W., which happens to be one of my pettest peeves!
The following is from Mark Scroggins’ blog, Culture Industry:
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… I quoted Oscar Wilde “All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling” – which prompted a useful comment from Don Share: “I’m not sure if genuine feeling is the same as sentimentality, but of the latter, Richard Hugo said: ‘Our reaction against the sentimentality embodied in Victorian and post-Victorian writing was so resolute writers came to believe that the further from sentimentality we got, the truer the art. That was a mistake.’” That’s a good observation, & deserves as follow-up a bit more of the context of Wilde’s remark (which gets quoted as if it were a free-standing aphorism, rather than a line from Gilbert in “The Critic as Artist”):
the real artist is he who proceeds, not from feeling to form, but from form to thought and passion. He does not first conceive an idea, and then say to himself, ‘I will put my idea into a complex metre of fourteen lines,’ but, realising the beauty of the sonnet-scheme, he conceives certain modes of music and methods of rhyme, and the mere form suggests what is to fill it and make it intellectually and emotionally complete. From time to time the world cries out against some charming artistic poet, because, to use its hackneyed and silly phrase, he has ‘nothing to say.’ But if he had something to say, he would probably say it, and the result would be tedious. It is just because he has no new message, that he can do beautiful work. He gains his inspiration from form, and from form purely, as an artist should. A real passion would ruin him. Whatever actually occurs is spoiled for art. All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling. To be natural is to be obvious, and to be obvious is to be inartistic.
To which Ernest replies: “I wonder do you really believe what you say?” A good question – one might argue, I suppose, that by this point in the dialogue Gilbert has become rather shall we say “carried away” by his own rhetoric on behalf of a formalist insincerity, a method for the artist to “multiply his personalities.”
The simplest thing to say is that “genuine feeling” – “sincerity” – is not enough to make good poetry (tho it’s great for voyeuristically interesting blogs), but that poetry can be a way of embodying such genuine feeling in form – a sincere regard for which (& here I follow Zukofsky, & suspect the Divine Oscar would agree) is a necessity for successful verse.

By: Chris Bock

Chris Bock — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 17:44:56 +0000

“All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling…”
-O.W.
“There is poetry when we realize we possess nothing”
-Cocteau
“it matters that great poems get written; it doesn’t matter a damn who writes them.”
–E.P.
“All our ingenuity is lavished on getting into danger legitimately so that we may be genuinely rescued.”
–R.F.

By: Jordan

Jordan — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 00:15:11 +0000

> Funny that modernism
It’s only funny until someone loses an I.

By: john

john — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 19:04:43 +0000

Pound’s old saw that an epic is “a poem including history.”
Funny that modernism is full of old saws.

By: Dwight Homer

Dwight Homer — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 17:13:21 +0000

“A poet must have a dry soul.” Howard Nemerov

By: Doodle

Doodle — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 16:18:38 +0000

“the politics in a poem has to do with how it / enters the world”

By: Michael Robbins

Michael Robbins — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 15:18:35 +0000

(Oh, I see, you mean what was Morrison’s source for the story. Sorry. I just woke up.)

By: Michael Robbins

Michael Robbins — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 15:13:54 +0000

John, the quotation tells you who Morrison is quoting. It’s the emperor Tching Tang, “the founder of the Shang dynasty.” He inscribed it on his bath tub (supposedly). But I think the veil of Maya might be onto something.