[Charles] Simic points out some broader differences between American and European approaches to poetry. "In Europe poetry has always been a literary undertaking, it's really part of literature," Mr. Simic says. "If you write poetry in a serious way you are participating in a very long tradition, over a thousand years . . . they don't have, for example, the tradition of confessional poetry, they never had a Walt Whitman." He adds, "Surrealist poets broke a lot of literary taboos, they were irreverent, but they would never write a poem saying, 'this morning, I drove my kids to school. . .'"
In America, he says, poetry can play the role of a journal, or a record of one's life. And yes, there is a downside to this "raw, direct quality that allows us to write endless, endless poems in our culture." He explains: "One could say, this is all wrong, this is the trouble with American poetry, so much of it is about someone's life, there is a kind of a narcissism, me, me, me, me, me, this is what happened to me, and therefore I'm going to record it, put it down. And we all as readers shout: 'It's trivial! Don't bother! It happens to everyone! It's boring!'"
From The Wall Street Journal.
4 comments:
Thank you for sharing this!
I took a class last semester on contemporary British poetry (from poets born after 1945) and it was amazing. The book we used was co-edited by Charles Simic. It was worth reading for the preface written by him and the introduction by co-editor Don Paterson (a British poet) alone. From Simic's preface:
"Compared to the British, a lot of what I saw in our magazines and books struck me as formulaic. The favorite kind of poem was a first-person, realistic narrative that told of some momentous or perfectly trivial experience. It was written in free verse often barely distinguishable from prose. Audacious flights of the imagination and use of metaphor were rare....The chief strategy of these poems was to conceal that they were poems by avoiding anything that seemed too imaginative or too irreverent."
Pretty harsh criticism, but I think he's right on the mark for the most part.
Louise - that is so interesting. Thank you for posting that!
Yeah, I got sick of the "male mid-life crisis" poetry post-Ginsburg. Other than that, you've got your "unadorned record of nature" poetry and your "lesbian relationship chronicle" and he's right--it all ends up seeming mundane. But I don't think he can pin that on Walt!!
Perhaps related?
http://www.sff.net/people/DTruesdale/wolverton1.htp
Post a Comment