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So. First: Frost. I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that your googling re: Frost's disingenuousness turned up David Orr's recent book. It has some really awful and pretentious title; I'm not going to look it up; I've read it, or most of it, in the local public library. Frost is psh. Okay. Frost purposely and deliberately writes to be misunderstood; his style is carefully and calculatedly designed to give a veneer of accessibility while secretly being very strange and difficult. There are a number of academics/critics (like current New York Times poetry critic David Orr) who use the fact that everyone thinks that Frost is a folksy New Englander to their advantage, building their careers around coming in and saying, "Well, actually, Frost is a very serious poet who is deeply misunderstood." They have a sort of weird symbiotic relationship with Frost's difficulty; they de-mystify him enough that people find a renewed interest in his poetry (and their books explaining his poetry) but they never de-mystify him enough to make him seem plain or uninteresting. They have an economic incentive to maintain an image of him as a mischievious genius that you can never be sure you quite understand. This is bolstered by the fact that most people (including most high school English teachers and undergraduate literature professors) misunderstand Frost in exactly the way in which he intended to be misunderstood, and perpetuate that misunderstanding in their students. You ought not to give Frost to children; it's like giving them Halloween candy filled with drugs and razor blades. [the part of me that expects constant abuse every time I show my face anywhere imagines that I'll get made fun of for saying that but it's true.] ----- oof. Sorry; I just took a few minutes to breathe. I'm nervous, talking this nakedly in public. You asked about mechanisms; i.e. how precisely does Frost write to be misunderstood it has to do with tone and aphorisms give me a minute and I'll explain. |
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Oct 3, 2016 15:24
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I'm very glad Manifisto has bumped this thread, and quite glad you're elaborating, FI - my 'welcome back post' was not meant as a provocation but more a note that it'd been good thinking material recently. Still, I'm glad you're advancing your theories here. You've thought about this far more than I have and I'm all ears (but I won't spread the thread around, either). Your engagement is much appreciated...
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Oct 3, 2016 15:31
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I don't understand the assertion that Frost is notably strange or difficult as a poet.
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Oct 3, 2016 15:38
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Mechanically. Frost is a very careful observer of how people actually talk. Specifically, the people who lived north of Boston around the 1890's. A big part of his initial appeal was that these people were flattered to read characters who spoke like themselves. The difficulty of Frost is that his tone is hard to parse; this is deliberate. A favorite thing of his in his correspondence (for example) would be to viciously insult someone in a passive-aggressive way which could potentially be misread as a compliment. I ought to have an example handy but I don't own the published letters and I also don't like to memorize cruel things people say to each other; it knocks around my head and makes me feel sick. So take my word for it (or feel free not to), but in his personal life he was a cruel, vicious guy who was cruel and vicious in a folksy way so that people could mistake it for (or plausibly argue it to be) bland, platitudinous kindness. The other thing he liked to do (and which he had an ear for) was the coining of aphorisms. The classic example here is "Good fences make good neighbors," which, though I haven't heard it in a while, ended up making its way into the discourse as something people would unironically say. The joke there, of course, is that the entire poem in which that line appears is a criticism of that belief, but that's easy to miss or misunderstand; the poem is a metaphysical argument but it's presented as a folksy New England scene where two neighbors are rebuilding a wall and the poem is "Mending Walls", if you want to read it; first line "Something there is that doesn't love a wall" for easy googling. Frost loved that people understood him wrong. He loved it. Anyway. The tl;dr is that Frost knows that people in the US (even then, when poetry was considered a much higher art form than it is today) were (and are) mostly unsophisticated readers of poetry and he takes advantage of that lack of sophistication to disguise and popularize his work; to do such a thing demonstrates an enormous contempt for your audience (and, honestly, for people in general). That's the mechanics. Why is deliberately writing like this a problem for Frost, you've asked, which has been most peoples' reaction to this thread (which is fine) this will require an advancing of a theory of poetics. Give me a minute; I have to do something else, then I have to make lunch, then I have to eat lunch, then I will return. |
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Oct 3, 2016 15:47
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thanks for this, it is honestly fascinating. I'm re-reading some of Frost's poems and honestly they're . . . different from what I remember
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Oct 3, 2016 16:59
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free Trapt CD posted:I'm very glad Manifisto has bumped this thread, and quite glad you're elaborating, FI - my 'welcome back post' was not meant as a provocation but more a note that it'd been good thinking material recently. Still, I'm glad you're advancing your theories here. You've thought about this far more than I have and I'm all ears (but I won't spread the thread around, either). Your engagement is much appreciated... I think about little else, frankly, so it's nice to have an opportunity to talk about it; it helps me set my thoughts in order. misty mountaintop posted:I don't understand the assertion that Frost is notably strange or difficult as a poet. I am trying to respond to this post but I am concerned I am misreading the tone, and I am unsure what would be appropriate. Please help me? Well, I'm glad that I'm not boring you; I know most people find this sort of thing tedious and my beliefs and opinions foolish and uninteresting, so I tend not to burden people with them as a general rule. After all, nobody really cares about poetry or thinks it's important, at least not anymore. ------ I have finished lunch and I have an hour before I have to be anywhere so I am going to talk about poetics next, which will make those of you who have thought the thread was dumb before really super think it's dumb and that I'm a worthless idiot. Which is totally cool and something you are allowed to think; I won't be upset. Give me a minute to figure out how I want to put this. |
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Oct 3, 2016 17:42
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Interesting to think of the time that Frost wrote and the culture of New England at the time where older New England families were seeing their kids move away from rural agricultural settings to the cities where they thought they could find new lives and careers while the newer immigrants and families (i.e. the Polish in western Mass) were flourishing and buying up the farms that the older families could no longer run and keep up. Part of my family came from Vermont and some of the little towns they lived in reached their peak in the late 1800s and the dreams of the older generation of making new towns and communities seemed to just disappear as the knowledge and land and history they tried to pass down to their children was just kinda thrown aside due to the excitement over new technology and an opening up of the world and access to information.
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Oct 3, 2016 17:47
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FilthIncarnate posted:I am trying to respond to this post but I am concerned I am misreading the tone, and You said that Frost was strange and difficult. He doesn't seem more strange or difficult to me than your average poet. There are really difficult poets, and really strange ones, and I don't think that Frost is particularly either, but maybe when I read about your poetics I will understand what you mean better. I guess the question would be "strange and difficult how?" ---------------- |
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Oct 3, 2016 18:11
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So. Poetry. Poetry is a thoroughly uncreative, unimaginative endeavor. In fact it is fundamentally opposed to the concepts of imagination and invention; it is their opposite. This is something that most people don't believe or don't understand, mostly because we live in a nonpoetic society and because the extent of most peoples' exposure to poetry (I know it was the case for me, at least) involves English teachers getting them to "write a sonnet" or a "haiku" or something in a high school/college English class. Which is fine but someone sitting down and wracking his brain for rhymes is not how any actual poetry gets written, or at least any actual poetry that's worth reading and is any good. The truth is that imagination and inventiveness are actually huge dangers for a poet, because they give him the ability to (willfully or not) distort and mangle his actual work. Poetry isn't like writing; it's more like stenography. It involves listening and faithfully recording what you um hear, for lack of a better term; Emerson would back me up on this. Being a poet is grueling, exhausting, tedious, thankless work, much like the digging of holes or ditches (a comparison I am qualified to make, and which I don't make lightly). It sucks. Nobody who is a poet really wants to be a poet; this is one of the reasons poets are always killing themselves. Since people seem not so willing to take my word on this, let me reach again for Kleinzahler, who wrote a poem on this very subject- all I can find is a google books result so here is the link. Nonetheless as a poet you have obligations; these obligations are not imaginary, though other people might imagine them to be so; you you mainly have an obligation to the truth, though if you're metaphysically inclined it's more accurate to say you have an obligation to God. And uh yeah. The reality is that Frost preferred being celebrated as a poet (gallivanting around the world, being famous, being a professor, having people respect and admire him, not having to worry about money) to actually being a poet, and when the time came he abandoned the actual work of poetry for what people believe the work of poetry to be; he knew he could do this and get away with it because he was essentially alone; he had no real contemporaries (with the exception of Wallace Stevens, with whom he was acquainted: they both spent time in Key West; actually, the Frost scholar I used to know would assert that the person whom Stevens addresses in "The Idea of Order at Key West" who possesses the initials "RF" is in fact a stand-in for Robert Frost) anyway there was nobody around who knew enough about poetry and the seriousness of it who could call Frost on his poo poo, basically, except Stevens, and he had his own row to hoe, and so Frost felt, correctly, that he could behave however he wanted and not be found out, and even if he were nobody would punish him or even realize that he ought to be punished. This is because most of the world doesn't really think that there's such a thing as the truth; businessmen and politicians and uh yeah they don't really think the truth is a real thing, and they think art is something their wives do: a pretentious waste of time, perhaps good in theory, but impractical and mostly worthless; not the sort of thing a serious person spends time on. That's not what I think, and Frost knew better, frankly, but he still Frost knew better than to do what he did but he did it anyway. And you can tell that he was ashamed of it because he hid it behind slippery rhetorical ambiguity and sort of lovely selfish petty justifications. Anyway I know this argument won't find fertile ground here but it's the truth: artists have serious obligations and some of those obligations have moral weight; you have a duty to be truthful and honest and forthright even (especially) when people won't love you for it; it's not permissible to flout your obligations and behave badly when you I mean if you just want to be rich and/or famous there's a lot you can do; if you just want to make money and not worry about the moral effects of your actions you can go into finance or politics or almost anything and do whatever you want; art is sort of a dumb way to go about it, honestly. Anyway that's a a theory of poetics mixed with some of my personal opinions; probably take it with an enormous grain of salt (like, bowling ball sized) and uh yeah. Well. That's about all I have to say. I could answer a few questions but I think I'm mostly done. About Polanski and Cosby I don't really have a lot to say; they're they do different types of art and I don't think I'm an expert on how they ought to conduct themselves (though obviously they ought not to rape) I mean film is difficult because it's necessarily a marriage of art and business, since it's impossible to make a film without an army (or at least a crew) of slaves, who are at least somewhat subservient to the will of the director, which immediately makes things morally weird in my opinion and standup comedy requires an audience; poetry doesn't. Poetry is a private experience, and poems exist self-sufficiently; they don't require a reader's involvement to exist or mean anything. Standup exists in between the performer and the audience, and it can't exist without those two things; but the work of Jesus, or Catullus, say, is can exist in a vacuum; it can be in a cave for a thousand years and you anyway. My point is that those dudes do different stuff and it's not poetry and I'm not an expert on it and I won't presume to lecture anyone on it, not that I should be lecturing anyone on anything, but there you go. Anyway. I guess I'm just rambling now so I'll stop talking. Luvcow posted:Interesting to think of the time that Frost wrote and the culture of New England at the time where older New England families were seeing their kids move away from rural agricultural settings to the cities where they thought they could find new lives and careers while the newer immigrants and families (i.e. the Polish in western Mass) were flourishing and buying up the farms that the older families could no longer run and keep up. That's really interesting; thank you for sharing that. I'm not a New Englander (I was born and raised in California) so all of this is stuff I'm not an expert on, and I appreciate your knowledge and perspective. (though it might be worth mentioning that Frost was a transplant too: he was born in San Francisco) |
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Oct 3, 2016 18:28
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misty mountaintop posted:You said that Frost was strange and difficult. He doesn't seem more strange or difficult to me than your average poet. There are really difficult poets, and really strange ones, and I don't think that Frost is particularly either, but maybe when I read about your poetics I will understand what you mean better. I guess the question would be "strange and difficult how?" Thank you for clarifying; I can try to answer this now. Strange/difficult two ways: 1) He is a metaphysical poet pretending to be a lyrical one, and his work is actively written to be misunderstood. This is different, from, say, Jesus, whose work is written to be not understood; Frost purposely cultivates misunderstanding, and is actively trying to deceive you about what he thinks and what he means. There aren't many poets who do that; it's highly unusual. Interpretation of poetry is hard enough without the poet himself actively trying to get in your way; you have to fight him every step of the way, since his goal is not communication but miscommunication. 2) He requires an enormous amount of background knowledge, but gives no indication of this fact. Lots of poets will signal when they've made a reference (Pound will just straight up quote Italian and French, for example, in an English poem, not caring whether or not you speak those languages) but Frost won't help you; in order to really deal with Frost you need (for starters) a working knowledge of the plants and animals of New England forests, a strong grasp of Darwin, a serious background in French, Italian, Latin, and Greek poetry, a comprehensive understanding of the history of a very specific period of the Roman Empire, knowledge of basic biology and farming, and a deep, almost encyclopedic knowledge of the Old Testament (or Hebrew Bible, if you prefer) and Shakespeare. But Frost won't ever indicate to you that there might be something you've missed. tl;dr It's Frost's overt hostility to the reader and his desire to imbed his unironic genuine thinking in work tonally designed to mislead that makes him well strange, at least in the context of other poets, who tend not to do things like that and difficult. Is that satisfactory? Edit: BBcode |
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Oct 3, 2016 18:39
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Thank you all for your time and attention; special thanks to the two of you who dredged this thread up from the depths six months after I abandoned it so that I could have to opportunity to finish having the thoughts I started having back then. It was really kind of you and I appreciate it a great deal. I'll field more questions (or abuse) if anyone would like to ask something (or hurl it my way) and then probably we'll close the thread so that people can have funny threads on the front page of BYOB instead of instead of whatever this is. Thank you again 
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Oct 3, 2016 18:44
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well that is a lot to chew on and once again thank you for sharing it. I wouldn't worry about feeling like you're rambling, those who are uninterested can just skip over your posts. so in your view is the true poet allowed to enjoy and celebrate language itself (rhyme, meter, cadence, alliteration, all that good stuff), engage in playful metaphor, that type of thing? or is that really too, um, self-indulgent to qualify as real poetry?
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Oct 3, 2016 18:57
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it's a good thread, FI, and you'll note it hasn't been gassed in the intervening months. so i'm pretty certain it's not tedious for most of us, and fits between the humour threads pretty well - we had a great urban planning thread in byob so there's a track record of very specific disciplines garnering interest here. (and although there is maybe one other place you might expect to discuss poetry on SA, you'd do it there with a lighter pinky on the ol' shift key.) maybe you're getting pms otherwise, but if you have a duty to be honest and this is what you're thinking about, a lot of us are happy to board that train of thought. i've more questions re: frost but i'll save them for when i'm more cogent tomorrow, do keep it up though... ~sig~ |
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Oct 3, 2016 19:12
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I only read the OP but this is a really cool thread. The reason I only read the OP is I don't want it to be a fakepost. Somebody inform me if I should read the rest. <3
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Oct 3, 2016 19:40
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Loutre posted:I only read the OP but this is a really cool thread. The reason I only read the OP is I don't want it to be a fakepost. Somebody inform me if I should read the rest. <3 If the OP interested you, then I would say yes. If you like having your mind stimulated by thought provoking sentiment, you should read.
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Oct 3, 2016 19:52
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Awesome winter sig by Symbolic, love it!
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Manifisto posted:so in your view is the true poet allowed to enjoy and celebrate language itself (rhyme, meter, cadence, alliteration, all that good stuff), engage in playful metaphor, that type of thing? or is that really too, um, self-indulgent to qualify as real poetry? If I were being a hardliner, I would say yes, that such things are not poetry. But I don't know what there is to gain from being a hardliner; I'm not interested in imposing my ideology on you all; I do not believe in the efficacy of debate; I am a great believer in allowing other people to be wrong. There's no reason to abuse and hassle people who think differently than I do; if people want to "enjoy and celebrate language itself", as you put it, who am I to stop them? Besides, I'm not a gatekeeper; I'm not a critic; I'm not an academic; I am not recognized as an authority by any official artistic governing body, if such things exist; I'm a manual laborer; my girlfriend is a schoolteacher; sometimes I teach martial arts. I'm really very much just some dude.  free Trapt CD posted:i've more questions re: frost but i'll save them for when i'm more cogent tomorrow, do keep it up though... I am prepared to end the thread here and now, but I will leave it open so that you might ask whatever questions you have left. I'm not sure how much more help I can be though; I've sort of told you everything I know on the subject already, unless people want to get into specific poems, which I don't really think I'll have the time and energy to do and besides you oughtn't to have me do your thinking for you anyway. Much better to do it yourself. |
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Oct 4, 2016 00:37
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free Trapt CD posted:we had a great urban planning thread in byob so there's a track record of very specific disciplines garnering interest here. (and although there is maybe one other place you might expect to discuss poetry on SA, you'd do it there with a lighter pinky on the ol' shift key.) I've thought about that the urban planning thread, I mean and the difference, I think, is that that (extremely interesting) thread had a whole bunch of people cross-pollinating, whereas this is sort of "Filth Incarnate Lectures Everyone: The Thread", and I don't really want to soapbox forever. I mean we're almost on the third page already; even I'm getting sick of me, at this point. Better to close the thread and make space. |
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Oct 4, 2016 00:47
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No, nevermind, I'm sorry, Mr. Free Trapt CD; I'm burning it all down. This thread is over; thank you everyone for your participation but part of art is knowing when things are done. |
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Oct 4, 2016 00:57
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