Dana Gioia: poet, director of the National Endowment for the Arts, and sensible man. I just read his 1991 essay on the state of the art (thank you, ThePoint), and thought you all would find it interesting, too.
So: anybody read any poetry lately? What did you think of it, really? We may as well start doing some decent criticism as anyone else: the whole web is at our doorstep. :-)
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3 comments:
I've been reading some Gerard Manley Hopkins. Some of his poetry, at least at first glance, seems to distort and stretch language a little too far. I suspect further analysis would show that rarely happens, though, since the poems of his I am already familiar with seem much more natural than they did when I first read them.
He's making me rethink proper English meter a little. His "new" sprung rhythm is simply a variation on what English poetry did most of the time before the Renaissance. Although great things have been done with it, I don't know whether accentual-syllabic verse has really been an improvement on accentual.
Hopkins is an interesting poet, because he is very technical--a poet's poet, if you will--but also a poet that non-literary people are willing to read.
I've never really understood sprung rhythm. I keep meaning to getting around to figure it out. Can you explain how it's a variation on what English already did?
I am inclined to think that shaking up the Victorian pure-rhythm and tidy-rhyme tendency was a good effect of modernism, but still have my Dire Doubts as to whether they did it rightly--in accordance with English as it properly ought to be--or not. Hopkins did too, but differently. People will argue with me vehemently, of course. :-)
First: the best brief summary of the possible types of meter I have seen is in the glossary of Hirsch's "How to Read a Poem." I believe you have it (we used it for Poetry class).
I first began to really understand meter while reading a book by Derek Attridge for a book report; I had ignored the study of poetry as much as possible in high school, and had only begun to learn meter in Latin class. The book went into great depth, but also surprised me by saying, contrary to everyone else, that iambic pentameter was not the natural English meter. Attridge posited that it was instead tetrameter, and not always a regular one, either. Leaving aside a bunch of interesting stuff that would make this inordinately long, "primitive" English poetry ignored syllable count, so lines varied widely in number of syllables, but had consistant numbers of stresses per line. Alliterative verse like Beowulf or Piers Plowman uses alliteration to mark stresses, though not every stressed syllable is alliterated. Many popular poems and nursery rhymes down through the ages have also been purely accentual in meter. Hopkins does other things in his poetry, too, like making use of feet that don't count in the meter--I haven't figured all that out. He argues that sprung rhythm is more natural to the English language than what has usually been used, and allows for greater effects.
I hope this helps.
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