Natural language or don't bother

[Luckieman]

1790340311[/url]']

1788743826[/url]']
[quote="matsunosuperfan" pid='282353' dateline='1788726417']
The older I get, the more I read, the less patience I have for affectation in poetry. Even a lot of what I used to think was great poetry, I now think is just okay, mostly because it can't exist without the aid of artifice, without the reader wilfully suspending that particular disbelief and agreeing to indulge with the speaker in the obviously false fantasy that the diction before us on the page is anything the speaker might actually utter in any context other than "poem on the page." 

It is harder to write poetry with plain language because now you actually have to just go find compelling ideas and images. There's no "I don't have much to say but it SOUNDS like I have something to say." You either bring an offering or an empty dish. None of this fancy-Tupperware-holding-a-single-dry-chicken-tender shit. 

Go read some James Tate, a poet who had the nerve to actually explore what a poem is at its essence, with all the emperor's decidedly not-new clothes stripped off. It's good for what ails, we swears, frodo bagginses.

We are 40 years deep in the "natural language" poetry movement and to be honest - a lot of it bores me now as it all sounds the same.

I think that makes the critical point. Following a movement as opposed to developing one's own poetic voice. The results are bound to be derivative (of the movment) and repetitive (as the same 'rule set' gets applied to every message). The ideal is for the form to follow the idea so the two integrate imperceptibly, which means every poem's form will potentially be different. The capacity to make this work only comes with maturity as it's intuitive, so many of us start by following movements. The danger is getting stuck in one for good. Sergei Esenin, one of the finest Russian poets of the 19th/20th century transition said in his autobigraphy: 'I consider that a poet cannot conform to any specific movement. It binds his arms and legs.' And to see how silly movements can become, one only needs to read Marinetti's 1909 Futurist Manifesto, for example:

'We want to sing the man at the wheel, the ideal axis of which crosses the earth, itself hurled along its orbit.'

which, if it means anything at all and is not just hot air, tries to dictate the supposedly legitimate subjects of poetry, instead of leaving that rather important decision to the individual poet - so deriviative results are inevitable.

This is not a new phenomenon. The insistance on Latin as the perfect model for poetry in the 18th and into the 19th centuries produced loads of boring verse. The problem is not that this adherence to what are effectively cults has happened in the past, but that we still keep permitting it to swamp personal inspiration. We only become real poets once we've gone beyond following rules, into the state where we intuit automatically the rightness of words and form for expression of each individual idea.

I don’t know that I believe in "real poets" any more than "true Scotsmen " but the rest of it is pretty much how I feel about it

Thanks Milo

by 'real poet' I just mean a poet who's succedding to get their message across right now. The more often I can achieve this the more real I become because it's the result that counts. I'm a firm believer in Flaubert's L'homme n'est rien, l'oeuvre tout!