Saturday, February 12, 2011

Nature rapta: a dialogue between two not so great postmodernists

Never let it be said I won't let the not so great postmoderns speak for themselves here. I'll agree to any terms of the debate between two opposing views of landscape provided it appear as a poem first. Provided it just look like a poetry of landscape. As far as I've been able to determine, they are talking about the same thing. It is with these two always hard to tell the poetry from the postmodern primers (something that's even lately grown outdated).

Again, the topic is Nature taken after their own temperament & understanding, and converted into some damn fine verses. To be perfectly objective, it seems only Marjorie's actually tried defining it for us.
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Frank says,

"I am the patriline who shoves pieces of eight & cobwebs back into my Tree Who'd dare co-author
 PDFs ('stead of stags in the woods) without me!

or lively & irreverent discussion but never daring, of course, to take a single unsolicited poem (none
of yr sacred woods) without me! E.g., at the base of the escarpment clinging to me

like the chip in my teeth is the smell of a rotten Ode which I hereby signify (in an open letter!) as meaning no more than the layers of my beard & all disassembled errata

for I propose to take the Self as (1) the mole's sinuous isochrony with the weed, identifiable by his
white male radical flows and available, for a Council grant, to any enquiring nibbling scholar, or

(2) the lachrymal weight of dried hearts wrung from bill and bp or (3) the lair of the unseen fox
with his keen rust-tipped finger

and especially the Olson nose for crumbling tufa Ah! sacerdotal passivity and friction
of smell itself (of beard, fawn, et al.!) that has ever led to poetry since 1965  Respectfully (?) yours,

To which Marjorie replies,

  "Ach! Nature's here a too mole-constrained, a too leaf-indiced space for me of jay intensity & grass frisson, estrus dissymmetry and  aggressivity: the ol' gridwork of male sod

and staid unthinking manure of poppa bears, replenishing diverted streams with their spit; the ant-
segregation and canopy-thinking style of binary bees, and

an optimal swale-obdurateness such as sink between emerging ribs  I, Marj, mean rather to be a matriline of rooks or mice, tracing out nebulae

in the night sandy terrain. Make your own micro-lairs like me! With a filmy layer of paisley shawl
round my arm, I try with charms or the rains to be sand-fractious

I the so-called creek mistress (1) won't live like Frank where there's the culpably and serially marshy, or
(2) harp much on the newness treated by sexology or sermons re:  lives of the soil, or

(3) even speak in ways that have to aestheticize hives of a field-mice system for nothing's more
antithetical to a wetland with bug than what I'll term  the imperious 'zed' Self (the unexamined zed of Self!)

Nothing worse!"

ENVOI (by Marjorie)

And where the sled's suspended on spring coils
in the red barn (with gloves and heels

still in the seat!) is a place in process only,
& never a landscape

5 comments:

Ed Baker said...

simple, eh?

poets come from poets
poems come from poems

the one reality of art/poetry is the one reality of art/poetry

..re or irre -gardless of any impositioning of meanin-g.

as CO has positioned "it" via that little pre to Archeology of Morning:

you islands

of men and girls


&, neat this juxtaposationing of a "male voice" & a "female voice"

& it s 'history.

(& let ss not have any ....political "stuff" about Olson the man/myth and his use of "girl" rather than "woman" or the poetry that for-soothed from him to us.


good post &

"I needed that!"

Conrad DiDiodato said...

Ed,

I meant also to show up the Canadian/American differences but hell! who can tell 'em apart anymore—especially when they write the ol' langpo.

Ed Baker said...

heck

tha''s another whole ball n can of wax/worms:

"show up" and / or "selling out"

as the Lang-Po just might be

"whatever sells is Art/Poetree"

and the prel-event of making a career out of 't ?

maybe it is (past) time to graduate out-wardly from "show and tell and say" to a
just-as-it-is & what-it-is position of an

Itdon'tmeanormeantosayanything

and:
the best works ( of art/poetry) are those where it is neither necessary or possible to "say" anything (beyond an all-inclusive/all-embrasive ....W O W !

not only is it near impossible to tell American/Canadian Poetry apart one-from-the-other
but one can hardly tell Their asses from holes in the ground ...

Anonymous said...

So there is such a thing as intellectual kitsch. Who knew?

Conrad DiDiodato said...

Joseph,

I like that "intellectual kitsch" effect of the poem. Perfect. I tried for an exaggerated postmodernism, with the inflated language (as you call the "ten dollar words")and the terrible disfigurements that always follow.

It's easy to fall into the 'langpo' allurements: very easy, indeed.