Sunday, January 7, 2018

Modern Poetry

I have not been writing much lately. This is partly because .I have started a course on Modern American Poetry. Not the famous Modpo, but a course run by Illinois university. I don't think it as good as Modpo, but I like the way it does include a number of poems(and poets) that are not part of Modpo. Poms covered so far are of the kind that I can relate to. These all fall in the period that is known as "Modern" and not "Post Modern" and date back to the early 20th century. But I have recently read some poems which were highly praised by prestigious American critics and these I am afraid I cannot relate to at all. It is not just that they are difficult to understand.  Of course I am old-fashioned enough to prefer poems that make sense to me, but I can often enjoy teasing out the meaning from a poem that seems obscure at first reading. I don't really like poems that are made up of numbers of seemingly unrelated images like those of Ashbery's later work., but I can get enjoyment from the vivid description in the word-pictures Ashbery paints. I can also enjoy the music of  many modern poems  though I may not understand what they are about.

I think it was in the New Yorker, (sometimes pages of this journal get sent to me) that I  read about some young American poets who had all received prizes for their poetry. I instituted a Google search and that is when I decided that Twenty-first Century Poetry/Contemporary Poetry/ or perhaps Post-Modern Poetry had past me by. I have experienced various set-backs recently. I was rejected at the MacGregor festival.The new on-line literary journal, the name of which I can never remember, informed me that the poems I had submitted were not of a high enough standard and the poem I thought had been accepted by the journal, Stanzas was not included in its latest issue. I read these prizewinning poems carefully several times, but I could make neither head nor tail of any of them.  It was not just a case of a series of unrelated statements or unrelated images, they seemed to me to be just a number of unrelated words set haphazard on a page. I read them aloud because I have found many poems come to life only when read aloud. Some of Gertrude Stein's work which looks at first glance like the "word-salad" of a schizophrenic, trips delightfully off the tongue and makes its own kind of sense when you hear it. But this was not the case with this poetry. It is true that American speech has its own  cadences and rhythm so perhaps I am missing something by reading the poems in my clipped South African English, but I don't think it is that. It must be I who is not in tune with the literature of the New Century. Perhaps I should consider retirement. At Eighty-three it is not surprising to find oneself a has-been.

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