"a different kind of unreadability"
Via Arts & Letters Daily, an extremely entertaing/informative review of three books of new "poetry". I put that in quotation marks only partly because Houlihan makes a pretty good case for most (all?) of this stuff not being language, let alone poetry.
For what it's worth, I like what she quotes of Baus, and especially what she does with it (although I think her example of a student who prefers her rearranged version of the student's poem - who has"simple ignorance about how to create a seemingly whole poem from a series of disparate lines, even though it was his own poem" is both telling and worrisome), I'm willing to admit Baus' similarity to the more gibberish end of someone like Grant Morrison may lay behind my enjoyment of the excerpts.
Scanlon, at least what we see in the review, reads like bullshit, and I do use that in the On Bullshit sense. Houlihan's observation in the midst of an attempted close reading that "[W]e have stopped reading this poem. There’s nothing about it in the first lines or the second or the third to gain our confidence that the organizing intelligence behind it is either organized or intelligent" seems accurate (although we are relying on examples she has chosen; on the other hand, I have no reason to doubt her choices).
As for Wolff, when I read the first excerpt in the review I actually like the first paragraph (stanza?). My mind sees at least some connections, albeit abstract/impressionistic ones, and I'm interested to see what comes next. And then, as with Scanlon, I hit a brick wall in the next section. There isn't any connection, not that I can discern, which leads me to think that what I liked about the first paragraph is illusory. Her second seems a bit better, especially when Houlihan gets into it. But, well, I'll let her speak for herself:
Even though I haven’t changed a word, or a line, only the order, it actually seems a tad more interesting this way, at least a thread of something is beginning to emerge—or am I just more engaged because I participated in it, however after-the-fact? Is it just because my projection into the Rorschach of this poem seems to me better because it’s mine?
Perhaps I’ve hit on the new reading by chance—perhaps this is what we used to call revising. It’s what we used to expect the poet to do. Perhaps poets like Wolff are engaging the reader through active participation, inviting the reader, with their “drafts” and strewn fragments, to come on in—be with the creator, pick up a pen, see what you can do! ... Don’t make the poet do all the work, then stand back and criticize! In fact, I can envision a “book” that is actually a collection of magnetized words and phrases that the reader can stick to a surface, move around at whim—oh wait. We already have that. It’s called magnet poetry.
For what it's worth, I like what she quotes of Baus, and especially what she does with it (although I think her example of a student who prefers her rearranged version of the student's poem - who has"simple ignorance about how to create a seemingly whole poem from a series of disparate lines, even though it was his own poem" is both telling and worrisome), I'm willing to admit Baus' similarity to the more gibberish end of someone like Grant Morrison may lay behind my enjoyment of the excerpts.
Scanlon, at least what we see in the review, reads like bullshit, and I do use that in the On Bullshit sense. Houlihan's observation in the midst of an attempted close reading that "[W]e have stopped reading this poem. There’s nothing about it in the first lines or the second or the third to gain our confidence that the organizing intelligence behind it is either organized or intelligent" seems accurate (although we are relying on examples she has chosen; on the other hand, I have no reason to doubt her choices).
As for Wolff, when I read the first excerpt in the review I actually like the first paragraph (stanza?). My mind sees at least some connections, albeit abstract/impressionistic ones, and I'm interested to see what comes next. And then, as with Scanlon, I hit a brick wall in the next section. There isn't any connection, not that I can discern, which leads me to think that what I liked about the first paragraph is illusory. Her second seems a bit better, especially when Houlihan gets into it. But, well, I'll let her speak for herself:
Even though I haven’t changed a word, or a line, only the order, it actually seems a tad more interesting this way, at least a thread of something is beginning to emerge—or am I just more engaged because I participated in it, however after-the-fact? Is it just because my projection into the Rorschach of this poem seems to me better because it’s mine?
Perhaps I’ve hit on the new reading by chance—perhaps this is what we used to call revising. It’s what we used to expect the poet to do. Perhaps poets like Wolff are engaging the reader through active participation, inviting the reader, with their “drafts” and strewn fragments, to come on in—be with the creator, pick up a pen, see what you can do! ... Don’t make the poet do all the work, then stand back and criticize! In fact, I can envision a “book” that is actually a collection of magnetized words and phrases that the reader can stick to a surface, move around at whim—oh wait. We already have that. It’s called magnet poetry.
