Another Open Letter to the Poetry Professor
Mood:
Tired
Page One of Two
Letter 3 of 4
April 24, 2002
Dear Jena,
During class held Monday April 15, I found myself exhausted by fragments. Laura’s poetry inspired the feeling, but that was only the straw breaking the proverbial back. After two years in this institution, I find myself literally hating fragments because they seem more and more an affront to the reader. "Here are clues and you put the rest together." This concept – allowing a reader come to her own conclusions is, I believe, bunk, false, a way out, the writer putting one’s head in the sand, to put it country simple: absolving one’s self of the responsibility for writing a real poem. I put fragments together every day. In every aspect of reality, in my half-completed job assignments, in the drive to work I negotiate stop lights and cripples and half-formed roadways leading to death traps. From people using fragments to express their feelings (elusive, as always). I come upon fragments that I must mold together. This mass and tangle wears me thin. Why should I want the same thing in my poetry? It is arrogant to assume that one’s fragments can lead to a greater whole since the whole idea of fragments is deconstruct the greater whole. Doesn’t a fragment nullify itself? So the writer leaves me with impressions, bits and pieces of things they are too lazy to put together. If I wanted to play with puzzles, I’d buy a puzzle.
This is the real reason behind my aligning my self with the prose poem as my (current) preferred form. Before April 15, 2002, I thought the prose poem allowed me to ignore line breaks, but as I continued to read poetry that I like, much of which is dependent on line breaks, I found that it was the fragment that held my ire. As a poetic device, it is not very useful because it is so simple a vehicle. The writer puts words on paper without regard to purpose except for the conceit that MY FRAGMENTS ARE DECONSTRUTING REALITY. Great! Now what!. Oh that Pound and Eliot had relied so heavily on them. Oh, that they had never formed the canon of American poetry! Let’s hate the fascists and adapt their techniques! And then there is the issue of them being a vehicle of liberal politics. The only reason any form is viewed as political is because of some paratactic linking of one’s own politics with one’s aesthetic tastes (i.e. if I’m a liberal and I like fragments, then fragments must be liberal; and, if I’m liberal and I don’t like conclusions (e.g. Rae Armantrout) then conclusions must be reactionary). As in class, you might try to call me on where she states this, I cannot. However, the whole tone of her article is one of disparaging the metaphorical with obvious slight to conclusions, and order. I’ll agree that left-justified, top-to-bottom poetry may be aesthetically "old" but linking this form to political ideals (personal or electoral or gender) is without much merit (to me). Linking form and politics is a Freudian enterprise – a complex model as to how the mind works but without ANY ability to test that model. There is no reason to believe that if more poets and writers stopped using conclusions and relied more heavily on fragments (or any other feminine -poetic model) that the world would change in a way that was envisioned by writing in a more feminine aspect in the first place.
My time served at Temple University has taught me to 1) discount the fragment as a useful poetic tool since it makes the writing of the poem too easy, and 2) to disbelieve the poetic form is
Polney Page Two of Two
a political; act – except to other poets who see it as such. I much prefer the libertine politics of Baudelaire’s prose poems (antiquated, left-justified, read from top to bottom) than any sort of abstract foolishness of the post-structurqalists and the trends they’ve enacted in feminism, art or literary theory. I think this linking might be detrimental to social causes. I revert to Naomi Weisstein’s quotation, "Poststructuralist feminism is a high cult of retreat. Sometimes I think that when the fashion passes, we will find many bodies, drowned in their own words like the Druids in the bogs."
Very Respectfully,
Rick Polney
Letter 3 of 4
April 24, 2002
Dear Jena,
During class held Monday April 15, I found myself exhausted by fragments. Laura’s poetry inspired the feeling, but that was only the straw breaking the proverbial back. After two years in this institution, I find myself literally hating fragments because they seem more and more an affront to the reader. "Here are clues and you put the rest together." This concept – allowing a reader come to her own conclusions is, I believe, bunk, false, a way out, the writer putting one’s head in the sand, to put it country simple: absolving one’s self of the responsibility for writing a real poem. I put fragments together every day. In every aspect of reality, in my half-completed job assignments, in the drive to work I negotiate stop lights and cripples and half-formed roadways leading to death traps. From people using fragments to express their feelings (elusive, as always). I come upon fragments that I must mold together. This mass and tangle wears me thin. Why should I want the same thing in my poetry? It is arrogant to assume that one’s fragments can lead to a greater whole since the whole idea of fragments is deconstruct the greater whole. Doesn’t a fragment nullify itself? So the writer leaves me with impressions, bits and pieces of things they are too lazy to put together. If I wanted to play with puzzles, I’d buy a puzzle.
This is the real reason behind my aligning my self with the prose poem as my (current) preferred form. Before April 15, 2002, I thought the prose poem allowed me to ignore line breaks, but as I continued to read poetry that I like, much of which is dependent on line breaks, I found that it was the fragment that held my ire. As a poetic device, it is not very useful because it is so simple a vehicle. The writer puts words on paper without regard to purpose except for the conceit that MY FRAGMENTS ARE DECONSTRUTING REALITY. Great! Now what!. Oh that Pound and Eliot had relied so heavily on them. Oh, that they had never formed the canon of American poetry! Let’s hate the fascists and adapt their techniques! And then there is the issue of them being a vehicle of liberal politics. The only reason any form is viewed as political is because of some paratactic linking of one’s own politics with one’s aesthetic tastes (i.e. if I’m a liberal and I like fragments, then fragments must be liberal; and, if I’m liberal and I don’t like conclusions (e.g. Rae Armantrout) then conclusions must be reactionary). As in class, you might try to call me on where she states this, I cannot. However, the whole tone of her article is one of disparaging the metaphorical with obvious slight to conclusions, and order. I’ll agree that left-justified, top-to-bottom poetry may be aesthetically "old" but linking this form to political ideals (personal or electoral or gender) is without much merit (to me). Linking form and politics is a Freudian enterprise – a complex model as to how the mind works but without ANY ability to test that model. There is no reason to believe that if more poets and writers stopped using conclusions and relied more heavily on fragments (or any other feminine -poetic model) that the world would change in a way that was envisioned by writing in a more feminine aspect in the first place.
My time served at Temple University has taught me to 1) discount the fragment as a useful poetic tool since it makes the writing of the poem too easy, and 2) to disbelieve the poetic form is
Polney Page Two of Two
a political; act – except to other poets who see it as such. I much prefer the libertine politics of Baudelaire’s prose poems (antiquated, left-justified, read from top to bottom) than any sort of abstract foolishness of the post-structurqalists and the trends they’ve enacted in feminism, art or literary theory. I think this linking might be detrimental to social causes. I revert to Naomi Weisstein’s quotation, "Poststructuralist feminism is a high cult of retreat. Sometimes I think that when the fashion passes, we will find many bodies, drowned in their own words like the Druids in the bogs."
Very Respectfully,
Rick Polney
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