The conversation going on in the comments field to my “ConPo” post is exactly what we need more of: discussions, opinions, positions, ideas, responses, pissed off jabs, etc from many different people who all take poetry seriously. It’s difficult to stick one’s neck out, particularly into the digital fields.
I’m particularly humbled and challenged by the words of some younger poets who have stated compelling positions on the flabby, forty-something, angst-ridden grandstanders of po-movements that occupy so much contemporary bandwidth. Brooks, Dan, Ry, Iain, and other twenty-somethings have contributed some insightful and important comments, and I deeply appreciate your words here.
Slow Poetry doesn’t have any answers, though it does wildly into the dark. And as such, it should be critiqued, investigated, and even satirized by sincerely engaged folks willing to look at it eye-to-eye. Slow Poetry should be a punching bag—or a comfy pillow—whatever it needs to be to get us all into a place of perceptive accuracy. Thank you all for engaging in all earnest with this conversation. F-ConPo represents such a sad, sad state of things---a Disney Land for the willing-to-be-bemused (aka the befuddled and manipulative, the easily-entertained-by the “ironic t-shirt”). There is not going to be a future for poetry unless we all (anyone willing to risk a sincere word) make it up as we go.
Followers
14 comments:
Dale,
Thanks for staying on the edge of the moment.
Tonight however I'm afraid I've caught myself locating the future of poetry in
some ghosts out of the past
Tom, sweet: I can't wait to check it out.
Thanks,
Dale
Dale,
I hear that there's to be a feature article on the growing Slow Poetry movement in the Buffalo News? And I see that there is even now a parody video of Slow Poetry out from the UK! You know you've got something going when they start making Monty Python-like films about you! (I thought it was pretty clever and well done, in fact. Slow Poetry needs to be able to laugh at itself, too-- something which Flarf (hilariously) just can't seem to do!
I just noticed, too, that Jerome Rothenberg is in the huge Slow Poetry feature at Big Bridge. That's interesting! Great feature.
Kent
Kent, thanks, and I agree entirely: Slow Poetry needs to laugh at itself. I certainly have spent the last few days feeling as though I were some mythological beast, composed in part by the body of a jack ass and the head of a lappet-faced vulture (http://www.birdfinders.co.uk/images/lappet-faced-vulture-kenya-2007.jpg).
And yes, it's an honor to include work by Jerome Rothenberg in the Slow Poetry feature.
And interestingly, speaking of laughter, in the article you mention above, Slow Poetry now associates with LangPo.
Well, I hope the writer interviews you on that "connection" before he writes the article!
:~)
Kent
Actually, despite my limited view, I can imagine associations with Langpo and Slow Poetry. I don't know personally everyone interested in or participating in Slow Poetry, and I wouldn't discount practices that differ from my own. Slow Poetry has to make an inclusive, but useful, space for diverse practices. The job though is to figure out approaches to poetry within realistic assessments of current environments. Goldsmith's expansionary model of writing misses the social reality we inhabit now. There is not going to be some Andy Warhol moment stretching into eternity. But we can take divergent ideas and relocate them within contemporary eco-systems.... More of this soon.
Kent,
where is this parody video?
Is that Professor Clark, the TC? I can't find his "ghosts" with that link...is it on his blog?
Also, since I've stayed out of these debates (although have been greatly entertained)...here's my contribution:
(Poem 9999, after Dickinson)
I’m so slow! How bout you?
Are you so slow, too?
Then there’s both of us—don’t tell!
They’d laugh at us, you know.
How marvelous to go so slow!
How shelled, like a snail
Wandering low to the ground
Sliming over pails!
marina
Dale – I’ve read some of your posts, and you sound like a fairly intelligent guy, maybe a little too sensitive, too eager to please. But what you’re doing here, man, is chasing smoke, a chimera. And if you’re going to chase smoke, you might as well make it a narcotic and not a laxative. Slow Poetry is a clever idea as far as that goes, but it’s merely a distraction. Why try to commodify what can’t be commodified? Poetry doesn’t have teams, and the attribution of “school” is an historical post-it note. To paraphrase someone even older and probably grumpier, poetry is the dream never stepped into twice. Don’t concern yourself with wankpo, geekpo or vapo, Pogo They will end up in their own self-devouring niche, an evolutionary dead-end. Smoke, smoke, that’s all it is. Grumpy Old Dude
Hey grumpy old dude--I agree! I am too sensitive, overly educated beyond my station in life, and much too eager to please (please who?--it drives me crazy).
But what do I do with that intelligence and sensitivity and eagerness to please?
Slow Poetry is not a "school." Nothing will come of it--ever--in the sense that what matters matters. Slow Poetry is far behind the present--far behind me. I try to make myself capable of a slow moment--a slow day--dig? People will meet. And eat. And converse. And go home. That's my vision.
Dale Smith has repeatedly threatened to encourage an acceptance of intolerance. Maybe that's just for maximum scaremongering effect. Or maybe it's because in a tacit concession of defeat, Smith is now openly calling for the abridgment of various poetic freedoms to accomplish coercively what his unreasonable proposed program has failed at. But this is something to be filed away for future comments. If he truly believes what he says, then maybe he should enroll in Introduction to Reality 101. Although there are no formal, external validating criteria for Smith's crazy claims, I think we can safely say that his nostrums are not our only concern. To state the matter in a few words, he says that his double standards epitomize wholesome poetry. Wow! Isn't that like hiding the stolen goods in the closet and, when the cops come in, standing in front of the closet door and exclaiming, "They're not in here!"? If it were true, as Smith claims, that poetic morality can and should be sidestepped whenever his personal interests are at stake, then I wouldn't be saying that Smith is entirely versipellous.
When I say that his animadversions are jaundiced, I mean it. I don't mean that they remind me of something jaundiced or that they have one or two jaundiced characteristics. I mean that they are jaundiced. In fact, the most jaundiced thing about them is the way that they prevent people from seeing that we mustn't be content to patch and darn, to piece and cobble at the worn and rotten fabric of Smith's sneaky, shabby op-ed pieces. Instead we must criticize the obvious incongruities presented by him and his chums.
I, speaking as someone who is not a splenetic wacko, understand that Smith's protests epitomize jingoism in its truest form. By comparing today to even ten years ago and projecting the course we're on, I'd say we're in for an even more satanic, surly, and dim-witted poetry, all thanks to Smith's type of mind. In point of fact, Smith's hypnopompic insights have experienced a considerable amount of evolution (or perhaps more accurately, genetic drift) over the past few weeks. They used to be simply pernicious. Now, not only are they both self-satisfied and irresponsible, but they also serve as unequivocal proof that he counts the most duplicitous Philistines I've ever seen as his friends.
Before I continue, let me state that Smith's encomiasts don't represent an ideology. They don't represent a legitimate poetic group of people. They're just flat. I've said this before, and I'll say it again, but some people are responsible and others are not. Smith falls into the category of "not." Smith has a talent for inventing fantasy worlds in which he has answers to everything. Then again, just because Smith is a prolific fantasist doesn't mean that the most slimy flibbertigibbets you'll ever see are all inherently good, sensitive, creative, and inoffensive. I won't pull any punches here: It's easy for us to shake our heads at his foolishness and cowardice. It's easy for us to say, "Smith's plaints constitute an instigation to reduce social and cultural awareness in poetry to a dictated set of guidelines to follow." The point is that it's easy for us to say these things because I have some advice for Dale Smith. He should keep his mouth shut until he stops being such a wicked agitator and starts being at least one of informative, agreeable, creative, or entertaining.
Despite the fact that there is nothing more tragic than to find a decent, honest person who's been misled by Smith's lazy, impolitic teachings, Why does he say such things? It is bootless to speculate on the matter but it should be noted that Smith's hatchet jobs are designed to concentrate all the wealth of the poetry world into Smith's own hands. And it's working.
I didn't know Dick Cheney was interested in poetry. Great to see his comment above.
It IS great. It's maybe the most entertaining thing to appear in poetry comment boxes in quite some time, so far as I can see. I suspect it may be written by a Slow Poetry partisan, actually, to cast a shadow of whacked-out anxiety over SloPo's enemy camp.
And the purple prose is priceless, really fun, especially at the lexical level: "versipellous, animadversions, hypnopompic, encomiasts, flibbertigibets"... (I don't know what flibbertigibets are, but I want some with my corn dog, that's for sure!)
No, with enemies like this, who needs friends? I'm pretty sure it's a spoof on the F-Con Po crowd. As the writer, or writers, put it, in closing:
"...Slow Poetry is designed to concentrate all the wealth of the poetry world into Smith's own hands. And it's working."
bravo!
Kent
I will not waste my time criticizing or insulting flarf as 1) it is unlikely to change, and 2) flarf probably revels in the comment field writing of shock and repulsion that it regularly receives. The crux of the issue is that it has never been afraid to leave the terra firma of reason and venture out into the open sea of passion, and (2) as a result of that, it has the characteristics of an unbalanced parvenu. Now that you know where I stand on those issues, I can safely say that it labels anyone it doesn't like as "unholy". That might well be a better description of flarf. It's a pity that two thousand years after Christ, the voices of brutish guttersnipes like the flarfists can still be heard, worse still that they're listened to, and worst of all that anyone believes them. Kent is clearly a paid PR operative for flarf - a drone. What flarf and Kent (and Smith) fail to realize is that its drones must be exposed and neutralized wherever they lurk. I can state with confidence that flarf poets teach workshops on deconstructionism. Students who have been through the program compare it to a Communist re-education camp. Flarf must sense its own irremediable inferiority. That's why it is so desperate to pit comment field trolls against professors; it's the only way for it to distinguish themselves from the herd. It would be a lot nicer, however, if flarf also realized that its understrappers care more about speaking, acting, and even thinking like flarf than they care about what makes sense. I've also reached a point where I feel the need to express my disappointment with slow poetry- which is yet another PR organ of flarf. As long as the flarf/slow poetry workshops keeps flowing and the paychecks keep coming, slow poetry's and flarf's myrmidons don't really care that I plan to strip the unjust power from those who seek power over others and over all of poetry. Are you with me—or against me? Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe everything slow poetry says is utterly and totally true. Still, the possibility does help one realize that there are few certainties in life. I have counted only three: death, taxes, and slow poetry / flarf announcing some slimy thing every few weeks. To be blunt, there is no doubt that flarf will provide financial support to slow poetry and vice versa like Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev toasting each other as the third world burns. Believe me, I would give everything I own to be wrong on that point, but the truth is that flarf and slow poetry have announced their intentions to crush poetic and spiritual values out of existence and substitute the vainglorious and politically incorrect and communist / vegan machinery of poetic imperialism. While doing so may earn flarfist and slow poets a gold star from the mush-for-brains crowd, only through education can individuals gain the independent tools they need to enlighten the mind of Man and improve him as a rational, moral, and social being. But the first step is to acknowledge that a day of reckoning is coming, and flarf and slow poetry will be called to account.
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