tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4014415529871703586.post3598018935680657687..comments2023-12-16T02:44:20.427-06:00Comments on Reginald Shepherd's Blog: Arrested DevelopmentReginald Shepherdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11965170916626482963noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4014415529871703586.post-18205268844273565432007-01-12T17:14:00.000-06:002007-01-12T17:14:00.000-06:00Reginald,
One can write in conventional forms and...Reginald,<br /><br />One can write in conventional forms and feel that their politics are progressive, but what Robert Duncan said to Denise Levertov in a letter circa 1958 seems quite appropriate. <br /><br />the conventional poet = universe and life are chaotic; the natural is formless (chaotic); the poet (the civilized or moral man) is given an order to keep against chaos. Every freedom is a breakdown of form. Freedom = (a) disorder or (b) sin.<br /><br />free verse = the universe and man are free only in nature which has <br />been lost in civilized forms. The poet must express his feelings without the trammel of forms. The poem does not find or make but expresses…Free verse just doesn’t<br />believe in the struggle of rendering in which not only the soul but the world must enter into the conception of the poem. Ginsberg’s Howl is one of Duncan’s examples of free verse.<br /><br />the organic poet = the universe and man are members of a form. Freedom lies in the apprehension of this underlying form, towards which invention and free thought in sciences alike work. All experience is formal – We feel things in so far as we awake to the form. The form of the poem is the feeling (and where form fails, feeling fails.) (Duncan/Levertov 405, 7, 8)<br /><br /><a href="http://www.globalvoicesradio.org/Organic_Poetry.html">My essay on the subject </a>has the proper format, which is lost on the blog comment stream.<br /><br />What one professes to be may not be what one is in real life, but the process a poet develops an affinity for says a lot about that poet. Does this mean Organic is good and Conventional is bad? No, but the School of Quietude moniker refers to a stance-toward-poem-making that extends the British tradition. It may be written in free verse, or may be new formalism, but lacks those qualities Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, and many others have outlined quite clearly in the last 60 years. <br /><br />As William Carlos Williams said in Paterson:<br /><br />Without invention nothing is well spaced,<br />unless the mind change, unless<br />the stars are new measured, according<br />to their relative positions, the<br />line will not change, the necessity<br />will not matriculate: unless there is<br />a new mind there cannot be a new<br />line, the old will go on<br />repeating itself with recurring<br />deadliness: without invention<br />nothing lies under the witch-hazel<br />bush, the alder does not grow from among<br />the hummocks margining the all<br />but spent channels of the old swale,<br />the small foot-prints<br />of mice under the overhanging<br />tufts of the bunch-grass will not<br />appear: without invention the line<br />will never again take on its ancient<br />divisions when the word, a supple word,<br />lived in it, crumbled now to chalk <br /><br /><br />Paul NelsonSplabmanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08068813038783953187noreply@blogger.com