School of Quietude
I wanted to post a comment on Ron's site, but for some reason I can't.
My basic point was this: I think Ron's "quietude" vs "past-avant" is an OK start for talking about the "anthology wars" of the late 1950s and the 1960s in the US - how certain poetics were attached to certain institutional situations. This somewhat reductive binary is useful as a way to begin to discuss these historical forces.
However, sometimes Ron seems to want the same conflict to be some kind of trans-geographic model for understanding all western poetry, and that's when he runs into problems. For example, he tried to apply it to Brodsky and Mayakovsky. I don't think it's useful when broadened like this because its strength is that it describes a specific historical situation. If we want it to apply everwhere we must make it so general that it ceases to have any meaning.
My basic point was this: I think Ron's "quietude" vs "past-avant" is an OK start for talking about the "anthology wars" of the late 1950s and the 1960s in the US - how certain poetics were attached to certain institutional situations. This somewhat reductive binary is useful as a way to begin to discuss these historical forces.
However, sometimes Ron seems to want the same conflict to be some kind of trans-geographic model for understanding all western poetry, and that's when he runs into problems. For example, he tried to apply it to Brodsky and Mayakovsky. I don't think it's useful when broadened like this because its strength is that it describes a specific historical situation. If we want it to apply everwhere we must make it so general that it ceases to have any meaning.
posted by Johannes at 9:28 AM
1 Comments:
I remember when he tried to apply it to Persian poetry (or was it Afghani?). At any rate, it made me cringe, because it presented a completely a-historical perspective.
Post a Comment
<< Home