There have always been fashions, coteries, and more than enough opinions about what poetry should or shouldn’t be… I’ll tell you what it should be, enjoyable and not too bloody pretentious, meaning let’s not waste time wondering about why some people hate some poems.

>poets hate poetry? as Genet has one of his “Maids” say:

“When slaves love each other, it’s not love they feel.”

I’ve seen way way way too much in crowd wanna bee ness in barely a decade just from happening to grown up near a poetry school and liking poetry (which are 2 unrelated facts– I think?/hope?

I like the scope of your perspective though.. It’s huge… and it puts pieces together from our culture, from poetry, from the in crowd wanna bee ness from idiotic “important” magazines from what the hell is poetry accomplishing feeling… it does a lot.

But I still keep hitting this though..

We, the public, don’t control the means of distribution in this culture (a didactic moment here…) Distribution isn’t just what makes a cultural thing a cultural thing it’s also everything that leads you to that thing and everything that makes you want to use it — our whole society is so marketed and marketeers obviously know how all this works.

But I know this isn’t what you mean by speaking through silence and fashion simultaneously — I’m being way too literal.

Do we mean it pretends in some sense, that it puts on airs, that it has delusions of grandeur? That its clothes, if there are any, are open to question, or the occupant too fat, too tight, or too idle?

Can something that’s too bare be pretentious, like a dress that’s just not there, or in bad taste–a codpiece or trousers for Porfirio Rubirosa?

Or too referential? Reverential?

Could Robert Creeley ever be described as pretentious?

Or Cummings or Gertrude Stein (and what’s the difference?)?

In a sense, isn’t all poetry pretentious? Isn’t that precisely why we all so hate it?

Christopher

I don’t know Coetzee’s work — I’m stupid about a lot of things! The comment Don quotes doesn’t focus on a particular writer, and I was responding to the generalization, in a generalizing way; again, not endorsing the views described, but sympathetic to them, although I wonder why anybody would bother to have a vituperative opinion about poets or poetry.

Not all novels tell stories!

Actually, though, I used the example of Coetzee because there’s a novelist who writes essays and is considered a thinker. It’s not just about story.

Usually I think when a, say, “brainy” poem or essay fails it’s because of obtuseness, not pretention. (It was Jordan who first called my attention to the “obtuse.” Good word.)

Depending on who does the telling, poetry either emancipated itself from or was brutally evicted from narrative two hundred years ago. Poets have been fighting a psychic war over the change ever since.

Maybe the “pseud” tag comes from people’s nervousness about not getting what poetry is if/when it doesn’t tell a story, rhythmically rhyme, or communicate clearly.

Thus: “It must be some brainy thing then, but since *I’m* smart and I don’t get it, it must be pretentious, pseudo.”

Modern painting and modern music get more slack because of the primary communicative concern of language. People get decoration; abstract visual pattern-making is, what, a millennia-old practice? The movies validate the expressive power of modernist music all the time. People don’t get decorative, abstract language, unless it rhymes. And note: trad. rhyming/scanning poetry told stories too; nonsense songs were consigned to kid-lit (Carroll!), with “mad” songs an academic category that few people knew.

Not endorsing these views, but not unsympathetic either.