Defending the "mainstream"...
Do you listen to pop music of any variety? Any rap or country or folk or indie? Do you hold the lyrics accountable for the same level of "interest"? Do you read narrative fiction? Why do those genres have a place in "simple communication" that differs from poetry...
Which again, is not to say poetry can't do both, but I'm arguing for the viability of the mainstream aesthetic here.
Why must sincere personal content immediately be categorized as hackneyed, or sentimental. "Standing in a cornfield thinking of my dead grandmother... I began to masturbate, wanted a cheeseburger, decided to join the Marines." Not that this is a poem, but the fact of expected narrative format does not always mean lack of interest.
Oppen has that prose section in "Of Being Numerous" where the dude rides a bike into a tree. Is that sentimental? Is that not of interest, simply by right of being persoanal and narrative?
My fear is that typifying a "mainstream" or an "avant-gard" or whatev... means that people who have already joined one camp won't EVER be able to truly read below the first surface of another.
They will see the man in the cornfield with the dead grandmother and not read beyond the fact that he is standing, in simple prose, and that his grandmother is dead...
I'll give you that most "mainstream" is more likely to take language for granted... becasue there are easier conventions...
Which again, is not to say poetry can't do both, but I'm arguing for the viability of the mainstream aesthetic here.
Why must sincere personal content immediately be categorized as hackneyed, or sentimental. "Standing in a cornfield thinking of my dead grandmother... I began to masturbate, wanted a cheeseburger, decided to join the Marines." Not that this is a poem, but the fact of expected narrative format does not always mean lack of interest.
Oppen has that prose section in "Of Being Numerous" where the dude rides a bike into a tree. Is that sentimental? Is that not of interest, simply by right of being persoanal and narrative?
My fear is that typifying a "mainstream" or an "avant-gard" or whatev... means that people who have already joined one camp won't EVER be able to truly read below the first surface of another.
They will see the man in the cornfield with the dead grandmother and not read beyond the fact that he is standing, in simple prose, and that his grandmother is dead...
I'll give you that most "mainstream" is more likely to take language for granted... becasue there are easier conventions...
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I agree with John about slam poetry. But at the same time, Charles Bernstein, who has said a lot about the constraints of "voice," has one of the more recognizable voices. Vers de societe. Metonymy. And Other Identifiable Traits. I think of Bernstein's work, in fact, as similar to that of the well known slam poet Taylor Mali. They use many of the same devices, have a similar intonation contour. They're not "Twinkies," though, just a hell of a lot more in common there than my poetry with Bernstein's. Driving a couple months ago, after reading a lot of CB one morning, thinking 'what song is Charles Bernstein.' This post reminds me of the answer that came. "Talk about pop music. Talk about pop music. Pop pop pop music." There's a near total abscence of sentiment (which differs by definition from sentimentality) in his clever Barthes substitutions. My intuition and experience are that if we write our poetry as it comes to us, it's gonna come in all kinds of forms on all kinds of subjects and ranges of feeling, and not always according to some parameters, delineations of style. If everything we write is recognizably in line with our espoused aesthetic, that seems, well, too deliberate. Deliberate, to me, suggests "one surface." Of course, where there is only one surface, there will be a 25 page essay going ad nauseum into the poem's form's importance and its polyreferentiality.
Laurel,
I like this conversation, and I mean to contribute, in a more substantial fashion, to the exchange between you and Josh when the time presents itself and my own ideas come into some sort of articulable space.
I just want to say here that your idea of the two levels reminded me of something my first teacher, R. T. Smith, said to me --- I can still remember him saying it. He said a good poem appeals to the reader on THREE levels: at the level of mind (here are story and concept and artifice and idea &c), at the level of heart (can the poem make us FEEL anything, whether through its story, sound, &c), and at the level of the gut (when the poem moves us before we understand how it's moving us). I like this notion in part because I think it enables us to move away from the schoolishness of so much discussion --- i.e., "Is this avant-garde?" "Is this language poetry?" &c --- and toward some description of the goodness (or groodness, in deference to Josh) of the poetry that haunts us. Sometimes, I think, that poetry will be at neither extreme of the stylistic spectrum and will appear at any place along a line of relationships-to-production, but it will be there and we will know it, right?
P.S. -- congrats on the Creative Loafing piece. When I lived in Auburn, Alabama, I was a regular consumer of such bread.
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