tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7357360.post111004366879019720..comments2023-05-15T04:16:08.419-04:00Comments on VERSE: Gerald Bruns' The Material of PoetryUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7357360.post-1132627669866438102005-11-21T21:47:00.000-05:002005-11-21T21:47:00.000-05:00Thanks for your comment. I think Bruns' book has s...Thanks for your comment. I think Bruns' book has some excellent points, and I'm glad he focuses on sound poetry and on poets like McCaffery and Bernstein. My main question is why his book is in such a normative academic style. To me, there seems to be a disconnect between his style and the aims of the work under consideration. Of course, I'm guilty of this in my own criticism 95% of the time, and I wonder why someone like Silliman writes about poetry in such a straightforward way. One person I see taking poetry criticism in consistently new directions is Jim Behrle (I'm thinking of cartoon series like Future Stars as well as his poem-pimping excursions). Behrle takes on the social world of poetry rather than individual poems (except when he pimps them), but to me that doesn't make him less relevant as a critic. When (if?) someone 100 years from now wants to know what the poetry world was like at the beginning of the 21st century, they could get more from Behrle's cartoons than from most of the reviews and essays and books published by academic presses.<BR/><BR/>I've been derelect in relaying what a few people have said, via email and in conversation, about the issues that Bruns' raises, but will try to sketch them out here: mainly, once criticism becomes idiosyncratic or otherwise abnormal, it ceases being "secondary" to a primary text and instead becomes a kind of primary text itself. Its focus, then, is less the work under consideration than its own processes. A few of Bernstein's pieces in Content's Dream do this, of course, as do books like Glas and S/Z. Given the recent chatter around the New Yorker piece on Ashbery, I wonder if most poetry criticism now is akin to literary journalism, at least in its general approaches, norms, standards of conduct.Versehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01173753299630591496noreply@blogger.com