I, Too, Dislike ItSlate celebrates poets who don't like poetry.

Remarks from the Fray:

Rhyme can be hackneyed or labored, or impenetrable, as in today's rap music, but at least it shows the poet's de minimus attention to the verbal texture of the work. The Greeks may not have had rhyme, but they certainly had metrical rhythm, as their poetry was meant to be chanted or even sung and often formed a crucial element in a large public ceremony. It was oratorical and therefore, by implicit necessity, rhetorical, that is to say, social, competitive, aggressive, in a certain sense political. Indeed, the poetics of rap are in this regard much closer to the ancients than any Wordsworth or Milton with their, respectively, breathless reflections on nature or allegorical-theological dramas. 50 Cent has much more in common than either of them with, say, Pindar.

All of which relates to the distinction between poetry and prose. There's an awful lot of poetry that fails to live up to the imperatives of that distinction. And what really bothers people, I think, is the question of bad faith in poetics. Interestingly, aesthetics does impinge upon ethics in this way, through the expectations created by formal tradition. Poetry, for all its woebegone impoverished decline, is still accorded a certain prestige in certain quarters. And, as practiced by the members of its somewhat incestuous professional guild, it continues to pride itself on its heritage as the oldest literary genre, etc. So people wonder, if the poet continues to claim the laurel of literary distinction and continues to present his/her work in the grand manner of the canon -- short, symmetrical lines arranged into quatrain-like verses -- shouldn't the verbal texture of the work bear out the necessity of these formal structures? Isn't it incumbent upon the poet to show that he or she can actually do something special or impressive with language?

--MarkEHaag

(To reply, click here)


…Pertaining to Mr. Pinsky's article, I can understand his dislike for end rhyme, but I must relay that I am not of like mind. I do enjoy the task of rhyming and reading it. Sonnet, villanelle or structuring iambic pentameter or something epic like Eliot wrote are rather archaic presentation today. The concrete poem is much less in print too. Haiku or even old Chinese styles of Li Po aren't as liked as I would have them be. At least not where or what I read. It's something modern, perhaps ritualistic to the effort, like reading at a slam or call up mike that I've seen to be popular with pop culture or college culture. Not that these aren't serious, rather that it's a funnel approach, blinders in place, to not be with them is to be against them…

I'm very pleased with approaching poetry for sound. That I can then first attempt to understand, then appreciate what word choices are used to stir emotion, creative tension, nuance idealism, and so forth. I find this approach freeing, stimulating and ideal to give me an enjoyable experience. To which Mr. Pinsky is to have credit….

--RyckNelson

(To reply, click here)


Poetry against poetry is an amusing theme the first time you do it, but even the contrarian stance can't mitigate the general obnoxious that it remains poetry about all the same. Beyond the fact that it usually a self-congratulatory clusterfuck where poets congratulate themselves on being the antennae of the race (Pound's dreadful hubris-choked flourish), but it illustrates a grating, even willful failure of imagination.

Poets, regardless of their politics, religious beliefs, spiritual side streets or circumstance of gender, race, or even intelligence, have an overall need to deal with the world around them, to grasp experience as something raw and full , and then compose a poem about it all when there is something on the mind worth recording and revealing to a curious audience; it ought not carry the reminder that the author is a poet having the experience and who wrote the poem the reader currently holds, presumably reading.

It detracts from the job at hand, it dilutes, it practically demands that the reader be grateful for the privilege to be in the presence of a soul more sensitive and attuned to life's nuance than him or herself.

Enough. Enough. If a poet has something besides themselves and their gift to share with us, please, let's read it, let's hear it, let's compare notes about life in this world. Otherwise, please be quiet, don't remind us that you're a poet in a poem you've written, and no, I don't want to read your medical chart either.

--Ted_Burke

(To reply, click here)

(4/6)