File spoon-archives/phillitcrit.archive/phillitcrit_2000/phillitcrit.0008, message 277


Date: Sat, 19 Aug 2000 11:55:10 -0400 (EDT)
From: David Langston <dlangsto-AT-mcla.mass.edu>
Subject: Re: PLC: Literary Saints



On Fri, 18 Aug 2000 zatavu-AT-excite.com wrote:

> Now, if you want to perhaps consider history, you might consider it in the
> context of the history of literature, particularly in the tradition of
> surrealism. 

Surrealism is more obviously and flamboyantly polemical than other
aesthetic positions.  Reading its poems depends on the audience
understanding the surrealist attitudes toward its opponents and
understanding the philosophical program that informs its aesthetic
choices.    Its use of Freudian psychoanalytic theories also give its
poem's a mastercode for deciphering them.

Barron's reading -- the poem suggests poetry is impossible to write -- is
as legitimate as any other until the reader knows more about the opponents
the poem has set for itself.

And on a cursory once-over, the poem looks more Dadaist than Surreal
because I don't see any of the the standard dream imagery.  (In some says,
reading Surrealist poetry and reading medieval dream allegories are alike
in that there is a code book for figuring them out.)  This poem seems to
string random words together with the confidence that they will reveal an
abiding truth underneath the superficial and misleading appearance -- more
like Tsara than Dali.

However, if Surrealism is more an influence than a program (as it is for a
fair number of contemporary New York poets like Ashbery), then the reader
would need knowledge of THAT artistic context to situate its meaning.  

The point is that reading never proceeds without some kind of context, and
the meaning of the poem -- including the decision to pronounce it good or
bad -- is informed by that context.

David Langston




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