On the other hand, one can admire & love the strange elegiac feeling of "Swamp Formalism", and imagine Lisa Jarnot actually responding with rueful self-disgust to the "poetic" improvisatory talent (like her own, the unacknowledged legislator) of Rumsfeld-in-action (at the news conferences). (I think the feeling is similar in "Land of Lincoln"; maybe I'm fooling myself.)
What bothers me is the dumbing-down of speech into a special idiom. All poetry is a special idiom, but if it's too obvious, you show your hand - ie. it becomes rhetoric. (Ron Silliman's pretentious syllable-counting only underlines - unintentionally - the artificiality, the mannerism, of the technique.) Incantantory, neo-romantic, poetical. . . & overly rhetorical. (Gabe Gudding - who believes that poetry is rhetoric - would disagree.)
3.12.2004
Labels:
close readings,
early poems3,
elegy,
Gabriel Gudding,
Lincoln,
Lisa Jarnot,
rhetoric,
Ron Silliman2
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