Bernadette Geyer’s latest blog post discusses how we poets are often ready to fight, cluck and ponder amongst ourselves about how different we all are.
How different we all are is nothing new.
What seems new to me is a fresh perspective that all of the difference doesn’t matter much when it comes down to reading a poem and assessing whether you like it or not.
Göransson mentions in his review the portion of Swenson’s introduction that references Robert Lowell’s quote that there is “cooked” and “uncooked” poetry. And on the same day I read that review, I was reading an interview with Peter Gizzi in issue #14 of jubilat, in which he says: “When I was a teenager, I began with the Beats, Rimbaud, Homer, Shakespeare, Hawthorne, Whitman, but I never read just one stream. To me the tradition is much larger than just the recent postwar ‘raw and the cooked,’ as Lowell broke it down. I didn’t want to think of it in those terms.”
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You’re right, yes, and we all pretty much agree on that when looking at the big picture, I think. But when I’m talking to individual poets when no one else is around, the thinking often gets very binary. I think that’s helpful to writing. In keeping the thing narrow enough to deal with.
But it does sound sooo silly (absurdly reductive), doesn’t it, when we start making “raw” and “cooked”-like compares and contrasts out loud?
Its in human nature unfortunately to categorize things…it helps us and our psyches deal with issues more readily if we are able to pigeonhole them.
Such a fitting quote from Peter Gizzi. I believe it not only applies to poetry; but to life in general. For anyone to grow they must share and cultivate their writings, no matter the format. Afterall “it is the written word that seperates us from all other species”.
StormSage — Thank you for your comment.