Comments on: The hybrid-way or the highway

By: 4 Modes of Poetry (Part 5) « A Poetic Matter

4 Modes of Poetry (Part 5) « A Poetic Matter — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 22:01:59 +0000

[...] entire collection, so it’s important to also understand the idea of hybrid poetry. Don Share wrote about it on the Harriet Blog last October. The gist of the hybrid movement is perfect for the greater modern [...]

By: Bhanu Kapil

Bhanu Kapil — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 14:27:48 +0000

Delayed, I find this thread. I think of hybrids as living bodies, and because of this, I do not understand hybridity as a genre use. Genre use that doesn’t engage the fact of the body…and what if that body is marked by race, or physically, in other ways — by crossings, by wars — in ways that body can’t readily conceal?

By: Don Share

Don Share — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 23:55:40 +0000

I hope it’s ok to reveal that the Walrus was Paul.

By: Rex Cox

Rex Cox — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 19:39:59 +0000

Looking through a glass onion- oh, yeah…the Beatles.

By: James Stotts

James Stotts — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 23:49:33 +0000

as a big fan of the four-line sonnet and the hay-na-ku, it seems disingenuous to buy into the ‘opposition of mainstream and avant-garde poetry’–those kinds of discussions tend to be more about politics than poetics. schools or divisions usually end up forming around one or a few individuals with a particular vision, and brought to conclusion by a few more who follow through and then overcome it–that is, they are historical more than anything else. and what’s truly divisive, or can’t be understood somewhere by someone, doesn’t survive. remember: poets survive because somebody loves them, is inspired by them. that’s not proof of quality, it’s just the mode.
‘hybrid’
chimera says
you have your mother’s eyes
you have the eyes of a nation
and that is why we can all tell
you’re not from around here
don’t blend in

By: john

john — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 16:39:37 +0000

Don,
Good question! Does newness wear out?
“What is good is what is news that stays news” . . .

By: Henry Gould

Henry Gould — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 03:23:10 +0000

Actually I think the so-called division goes back further, to Whitman & Longfellow (Song of Hiawaths and Song of Myself, both published in 1855).
Poe & Dickinson as counter-tenors. Melville (Clarel) as b-flat double-bass.
We don’t know or understand our own history… & yet we gab, & worry, & compare…

By: Don Share

Don Share — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 00:32:48 +0000

Hey, Henry, thanks for this comment. I don’t think I have much to quarrel with in what you say. I’ve been wanting to add, generally, a paraphrase of Pound, though: when it comes to the passage of time in poetry, “distance avails not.” (He actually said this of translation.)

By: Henry Gould

Henry Gould — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 00:16:33 +0000

It seems to me that Don Share (& Robert Von Hallberg) overstate, rhetorically & polemically, Pound’s disruption of prose values – since Pound was an enthusiast for BOTH ends of the spectrum. That is, for imagistic, ideogrammatic short-cuts, as well as for the prose realism of a number of early 20th-century novelists (from James to Joyce). And this enthusiasm for prose had a subterranean influence, by way of WCW and others, on the 60s prose/free-verse wave beginning with Lowell’s “Life Studies”.
Though perhaps Don is right to suggest that the binaries of US poetics began with Pound’s imagism. An anthology of “hybrid” poetics clearly attempts to ratify the existence of such a binary (since constructed on a melding or resolution of same).
Van Hallberg writes : “The shock of Fenollosa’s or Pound’s ideogrammic method is gone… Poets and their readers commonly understand that intelligiblity is not limited to what can be concisely stipulated. Some poets urge their art into the gap between what conventional discourse comprehends and what readers of poetry may apprehend. As they do so, intelligibility is inevitably spoken of in the subjective mood. One asks, poem by poem, how unintelligibility brings gain, and of what kind.”
- this reminds me of Leopardi’s criticism of a lot of (English) Renaissance & Baroque (Metaphysical) poetry – that the focus is on surface glitter and rhetorical tricks & flash. A coterie poetry – verbal pyrotechnics, rather than plot (story) or feeling. Which relates to Bill Knott’s pathetic complaint or caterwaul. The assumption here (in Von Hallberg) is that “conventional discourse” is some kind of firm but drab template against which the rhetorical tweaks and twitches of poetic “experiment’ lead to new visions… sad to say Rimbaud laughed this off over a century ago (before the Moderns even got started). There is no rhetorical or artsy solution to the blindness & tragedy of the human predicament.

By: Don Share

Don Share — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 00:15:09 +0000

About which, I now see, Bill has this to say.