To make life...to create interest and vividness, it is necessary to break form, to distort pattern, to change the nature of our civilization. In order to create it is necessary to destroy; and the agent of destruction in society is the poet. I believe that the poet is necessarily an anarchist, and that he must oppose all organized conceptions of the State, not only those which we inherit from the past, but equally those which are imposed on people in the name of the future.
—Herbert Read, Poetry and Anarchism (Faber and Faber, 1938)
2 comments:
I would agree with this except that the poets today who get most of the attention are threatening to destroy poetry itself. I'm, of course, thinking of the LANGUAGE crowd. It's willful and wanton disregard for the conventions of language that assure a future for poetry itself.
If we take a chance with theory (and we ought to from time to tome) it's to illustrate an actual relation to an idea of the nature of poetry that's momentarily suspended (or put in some sort of healthy tension). The "thing" itself must always be preserved however problematical or illegitimate its forms may look. Again, it's always good to keep poetry dissociated from its current formulations until a more interesting synthesis of idea and practice comes along. This is poetry's (imo) transcendental nature.
The problem with LANGUAGE is that its refusal to stay tied to formalist notions ("school of quietude")amounts to wholesale destruction.
Herbert Read was one of those scary smart people. He's known more for art crit than his poetry, but he did some poems at one point that were proto-language poetry. So he got there first, so to speak.
Your notion of poetry is certainly in line with the Objectivists, one of the streams of modern poetry that has meant the most to me.
I don't know that language poetry has that much power. It had its day and continues to have some sway, but I don't think poetry is imperiled by it.
Even Stevens (that should be a title to an essay), perhaps riffing from something Picasso said, talked about poetry as a 'horde of destructions'.
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