Thread on contemporary poetry polemics: Ezra Pound wrote in The ABC of reading that poetry should move, instruct or entertain...
Debates about craft are implicitly framed as a debate about best means to achieve these ends 2/
But the heart of the matter is, I think, not about tactics or strategy, but about the utopia itself 3/
Is poetry about offering an affective experience (joy, consolation, etc) 4/
In which case nobody can argue with my experience and the poem is good if it makes people feel something 5/
In utilitarian, market driven world, the more people who feel something, the better the poem 6/
Or does the poem bring wisdom, knowledge, an expansion of vocabulary and worldview, a new way of seeing and being 7/
We can debate until cows come home whether a poem achieves what it sets out to do, but the debate about what it ought set out to do is a philosophical and aesthetic one 8/
It’s misguided to judge a poem’s craft according to a standard that is foreign to it 9/
But it’s also narrow minded to think that just because a poem is well crafted to achieve a certain effect that we have to agree that this effect is worthy of the highest praise 10/
Pluralism re: craft is easy; there are many ways to achieve an effect 11/
Pluralism re: purpose is more difficult: after all, questions like “what are poems for in destitute times?” are inherently contentious 12/
I wish we would talk more about what poems are for and not only on whether they are well constructed 13/
For instance, I think most poems fail to deliver wisdom, but if a poem’s task is to deliver something else than that’s Ok. 14/
As a skeptic, my recognition of philosophy’s limits leads me to regard poetry as an important corrective/supplement, to what rational thought can’t say 15/
But let’s not “retreat from judgment” (Arendt) either and think that poetry is merely an aesthetic enterprise and not a form of thinking that can be more or less revelatory, insightful, prophetic. 16/
“Good poems” in an unjust world are as legitimate as “good laws”; but perhaps the best poems and the best laws need to be considered bad if they seek to expose society to its received pieties. 17/
And of course it’s more complicated, but the popular discussion of poetry is lacking in philosophical reflection to its detriment. /End
