Showing posts with label Poetic Criticism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Poetic Criticism. Show all posts

Monday, June 16, 2008

"World Championship in Poem Criticism"

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Poets.org v. Poets.net!


Has anybody noticed it, but temperatures are rising in the PoBiz. There’s even a controversy raging over at Poets.org, of all places--about Prosody! Indeed, the ivy on the walls of the Academy of American Poets is quivering, and some say bits of plaster are beginning to flake from the ceilings and the doors won’t stay shut.

Oh dear.

The question is, are the Rules of Metrical Analysis as laid out by the Schoolmasters and Prefects at The Academy’s own Poets.org Forum going to be mandated as the sine qua non for Aspiring Writers to find Success in poetry today in America? Is that the Certificate every poet is going to need?

Well, there are two camps engaged in the dispute, the AAP 'Academicians' on the one hand, strict, self-righteous and undistracted by humor, and a small group of unwashed 'Irridescent Harlequins' led by the critic, Tom West--who also appears from time to time, you might have noticed, on this site.

The argument is about the role of Prosody today in the definition and evaluation of poetry. The AAP Academicians, whose livelihoods, needless to say, depend on teaching the stuff, want everybody to promise to agree that unless you know the AAP On-line Rules of Prosody, and apply them correctly, of course, any poem you write or critical pronouncement you make will be invalid--no "anacrusis" no line, no line no poetry, no poetry no poet, no poet no prize, no prize no job--as simple as that.

So that’s who the AAP Magister Ludis are, who are the Iridescent Harlequins? They’re essentially critical carpet baggers, which is certainly how they appear on the site, and they feel like most tent-show magicians that every trick in the critical bag is valid as long as it works. More than that, and much more threatening to the Magister Ludis, needless to say, the Harlequins feel that obsessively clinging to just one tool at a time is boring, that it's aesthetically extremely limited and wrong, and that it leads to cruelty, dictatorship, and bad poetry.

Needless to say, the Iridescent Harlequins are a scarcely tolerated intervention on a Forum based specifically on tool-control, and in the past weeks two close friends have been quietly banned from the discussion on the grounds they were someone called Christopher Woodman, based on his style, not his IP. Oh, and do take note that the thread on which all this is transpiring is called "On Aspiring Writers Becoming Successful Writers," a TomWest formulation, of course, but started by 'ACommoner'—another Harlequin who along with his wife, a doctor of traditional medicine, take note, has already been stripped of his AAP gown.


19,446 visits too!

Got it, then? You’re the AAP, so you make the tools essential to poetry, for reading it as well as for writing it, and you make it clear you actually own those tools. You've got them and you've patented them, and the Laws of Po-Land decree that without them no one can get certified as an SP (Successful Poet). Like lawyers, a whole gaggle of AAP Para-Critics control access to the Laws of Poetry by making them so complicated and abstruse, and expressed in foreign languages too, of course, that you have to get down on your knees before those same Para-Critics if you want them to pay attention to you, or to assure your security inside and outside the site, or to intimidate other uninitiated poets as you gradually work your way over their heads and all the way on up to the top of the field.

So that’s the Big Fight in progress over at Poets.org--you might want to peak in and gawk at it. Here at Poets.net we've got a circus as well, I mean, we've got the World Championship in Poem Criticism, ATHENA v. DLUX!--which cuts all the Gordian critical knots of control in one sweet, two-handed swoosh. Don’t miss this beautiful exchange, such a powerful example of Can There Be Poem Criticism without PoBiz Criticism, as it’s billed--which is, in case you hadn’t noticed it, the title of Matt Koeske’s essay that opens the eponymous thread. Indeed, this is the sort of criticism we model on Poets.net as an alternative to the School-room Capitalist Criticism at Poets.org--"School-room Capitalist Criticism" because it functions like a modern Law School (Medieval Guild?) which owns the subject and then sells it to the highest bidder, so to speak--and then inducts that highest-bidder in turn into the Cartel that controls the Racket!

There have been a number of brilliant moments in the Non-Prize Fight on this thread, culminating in Athena's extraordinary evocation of a cracked recording of Edna St Vincent Millay reading her poetry as an example of..... well, we’re not quite sure of what, not being in the habit of defining other people’s feelings either, but certainly of something pretty "universal!" DLUX hotly proclaims it's "Performance Poetry" but Athena equally passionately proclaims "Performance Poetry doesn't exist." And what is so revolutionary about this irreconcilable amour is that it gives us an insight into the very heart of the critical process of activating a poem in such a way that it's no longer just a commodity, that a poem actually IS something and MEANS something of great value--which in poetry today is extremely rare.

Yes, these two very fine Royals, one semi-human (ATHENA) and the other semi-divine (DLUX), have played out for us the finest performance of "Poem Criticism" we’ve yet seen on any poetry site!



So stay tuned!


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Tuesday, June 10, 2008

Guest Writer: Monday Love Weighs in on "Foetry Politics"

(This post has been elevated from the comment section of the Writing Forum Survey. In his post Can There Be Poem Criticism Without PoBiz Criticism?, Matt Koeske responds to Monday Love.)

Many who love poetry look at ‘foetry politics’ and say, ‘but what’s this got to do with poetry? If editors and poets use creative marketing and fund-raising methods which are not pure as the driven snow, if coteries exist in which friends support each other, so what? This has always been done and always will be done, and there are enough honest platforms out there for poetry, so what’s the big deal? If I really love poetry, why should I care about this nonsense? It’s trivial to me.’

Poets.net probably needs to answer this question.

Corruption is more wide-spread than anyone realizes.

Po-biz is very, very small and almost all the coteries are connected, and if you don’t happen to belong to one of these coteries, you really will lose out on a slice of the pie.

'Group-think’ permeates po-biz, due to the existence of coteries. This is a subtle point, because it is true that coteries and ‘group-think’ which arises due to coterie behavior is normal and there is nothing wrong with it, per se.

However, since poetry does suffer from a severe lack of open markets (because poetry doesn’t sell on its own and requires university subsidy and fees collected from contests which are run and won and judged by a relatively small group, consisting largely of these defined coteries) this ‘group-think’ does stifle free discourse, not from any conspiracy, but simply from the nature of coterie group-think, which, again, is quite normal.

“Group-think’ is really a misnomer, because ‘thinking’ isn’t really what occurs; it’s really a non-thinking gesture which prevails, an irritation with lively and original investigation; any ‘thinking outside the box’ is viewed with suspicion, since the insularity of 'group-think' is unconsciously rewarded and defended for the survival of what is essentially an entity which exists accidentally, not out of any necessity.

Coteries exist for themselves, not for the sorting and processing and development of new knowledge, and too much activity in the ‘knowledge’ area sends out warning signals to the coterie or club. Coteries always appear ‘innocent,’ precisely because they are ‘accidental’ (they contain persons X, Y, and Z for various social reasons, and most, if not all, are perfectly healthy reasons).

Coteries are ‘innocent,’ because they exist, not abstractly, but socially; they have no agenda beyond, ‘these are my friends and we together doing what we love.’

These ‘innocent persons’ are the first to protest when ‘necessity’ is introduced: “You are nothing but a coterie, you are not helping poetry, per se, poetry requires a more systematic investigation of…” These sorts of comments are those which immediately send up the flags, and this, in a nutshell, characterizes the current struggle between “Foets and anti-Foets” in poetry, today.

The coteries react with ‘innocent’ indignation (‘you hate us merely because we exist’) and the outsiders reply, ‘yes we hate you because you exist (for yourselves) merely.’

What gives the debate outlined above even more momentum is the following: The coteries become more and more enamored of the 'friendly' nature of the coterie-process and gradually become less enamored with intellectual debate and process, while the outsiders continue to become more enamored with intellectual debate and process, resenting more and more the friendly nature of the coterie process.

The rift widens, and the two sides become more and more irritated with the signals given off by either side. The coteries can smell the type who is ‘desperate for argument,’ while the outsiders feel they are quickly labeled a ‘troublemaker’ for daring to argue about anything substantial. The ‘anti-argument’ and the ‘argument’ sides solidify into their respective identities, and the end result is that the coteries grow more and more anti-intellectual while the outsiders grow more and more ferociously intellectual and argumentative; but even worse, the status quo of the coteries, in order to secure intellectual respect, will strive to be intellectual in highly bizarre and technical ways, while the outsiders, striving to appear friendly, to make up for a lack in that regard, turn timid and acquiescent--thus both the outsider’s passion AND the inquisitive intellectuality of the insider’s coterie-status quo become diminished to such an extent, that poetry loses even the minor edge it once possessed.

A great dishonesty finally prevails, with coteries pretending to be intellectual in more and more Byzantine ways, scaring more and more laypersons away, while poetry outsiders fall into toothless and ‘out-of-touch’ impotency.

Since poetry is ‘market impotent’ in general, coteries come and go fairly quickly, even occasionally receiving new blood from the quarrelsome, anti-social outsider.

So the rift exists in the first place, then becomes diminished, and sometimes disappears, but in a process, as described above, which damages poetry as a social entity and as an art.

Discussion within poetry loses effectiveness, for no one is talking to each other about poetry with an independent spirit; fashionable theories and ideas are repeated and shallowly discussed, everyone looks to each other, attempting to get clues as to what to say next, radical anti-intellectual statements are allowed to pass, since no one is prepared, to defend, in any substantive manner, any intellectual idea or principle, the whole of this idea having been eroded by groups staking out positions in the manner described above.

So here we are back to where we started: “for no one is talking to each other about poetry” and this was the initial complaint upon which I launched this commentary. It may be pointed out that I am guilty of the same thing, since here, at some length, I am demonstrating the problem of which I complain: verbosity which has nothing to with poetry; but the careful reader will see that I am clearing ground so that discussion of poetry might exist in a more fruitful manner; and also I would remind the reader that poetry can not be boiled down to ‘itself;’ the structure of po-biz will always matter, just as who writes the canon and the textbooks and the reviews and who writes the poetry, will always matter, beyond ‘the poetry’ itself.

Monday Love

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