Archive: Discussion between Vendler, Burt, Scharf and Perloff: Poetry Criticism - what is it for?
Burt: 'Louise Glück has argued that some of our most difficult poets are practicing ersatz thought, trying to take credit for grand philosophical gestures and genre-breaking meta-creations when in fact they've run out of things to say.
I didn't like that essay when I first read it, but now I think she has a point. The linguistic turn, the turn towards extreme surface difficulty, in contemporary writing—and not only in self-described "language writing"—came about in part because third-generation American confessional poetry, poetry about the biographical and affective history of the self, by the mid-1980s had become omnipresent, exhausted, and dull. (Unless it was by Glück herself, or by Frank Bidart.)
But now it's disturbing to see how readily computer programs can simulate the farthest-out, least-referential "innovative writing"; do we really want more poems that wouldn't pass Turing tests?
I didn't like that essay when I first read it, but now I think she has a point. The linguistic turn, the turn towards extreme surface difficulty, in contemporary writing—and not only in self-described "language writing"—came about in part because third-generation American confessional poetry, poetry about the biographical and affective history of the self, by the mid-1980s had become omnipresent, exhausted, and dull. (Unless it was by Glück herself, or by Frank Bidart.)
But now it's disturbing to see how readily computer programs can simulate the farthest-out, least-referential "innovative writing"; do we really want more poems that wouldn't pass Turing tests?
posted by Edward Barker at 1:20 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home