ABSTRACTION AND CLARITY

 

Experimental poetry used to be the kind of stuff that broke with established forms of verse writing, both in form and aesthetic. A good survey course in Western poetry will pretty much be the history of one school of poetry arising in response and/or rebellion against forms that had long been dominant, with the more daring and expansive poetry influencing younger poets to the degree that the experimenters over time become the old guard. This goes on and on, exceptions to rules becoming rules until another generation of impatient experimenters comes along with their contrarian notions of what verse should be, usurping fusty older poets and becoming the dominant ones themselves—fat, complacent, and ripe for overturning. I don’t know if that’s a working dialectic, but it is something that has continued since literate men and women sought to express grand and vague inspirations in language that did more than merely describe or paraphrase existence. It’s my feeling that experimentation has become the norm and that what we have these days is a recycling of previous avant-garde ideas and gestures, with the names of theories and practices changed ever so much.

But not so much. It's gotten to the point that the school of poets referred to as the New Formalists—poets who’ve tired of free verse and variable feet and the several generations of “open forms” in poetry, and who compose poems that rhyme and employ traditional meter—have become controversial in that they threaten to usurp the hegemony of the experimental tradition.

To each their own as to what they prefer to put in front of their eyes, and to each their own for developing a critical rationale for what sorts of peculiar phrase deformations give them pause to stroke their chin, scratch their head, and laugh or cry as the case may be. Emotional responses reconstituted and subjected to the marginalia that make even recipes for stone soup resemble nothing less than unappetizing exercises in gratuitous brain power are, to an extent, another sort of poetry. It's a condition that admits, tacitly, that we're unable to get to the actual heart of our states of being, fluid as they are, but we are capable of conducting our recollections through a lexicon that most closely resembles whatever idealized paradigm momentarily fits the fleet-footedness of perception. It's guesswork of a kind, never on the money, never finalizing the dissension among the talkers who wait their turn to speak their world into existence, but still, something that brings a quality we cannot live without. A love of process, of trying to come up with means, methods, and ideas of using language that is as fluid and predictable as the experience itself.

Myself, I am attracted to any kind of poetic writing that has that rare quality of being fresh and unique; I am less intrigued by the theory behind a poem, experimental or traditional, than I am by how it reads, by whether it works. If it produces a reader’s satisfaction, then it becomes useful to investigate what a writer has done as an artist in this odd medium, bringing skill and on-the-fly inspiration to bear in the writing. This is the case with Ron Silliman and John Ashbery, two poets who have arrested my attention with their creation of indirect address of the living expression, and it is the case with Thomas Lux and Dorianne Laux, two other poets who are not averse to letting you follow their line of thinking and who still lead you to results that are unexpected and extraordinary.