I am not the best editor in the world because I am impatient with what I conceive to be faddish or academic flourish, and I dislike cool remoteness. I'm also suspicious, as I've mentioned here before, of prose poems and what seems to be careless handling of line and stanza breaks--all of which contribute to a certain close-minded irritation with the so-called "new."
The set of poems under discussion certainly did not have any of these technical flaws: they were tightly crafted and both structurally and dramatically coherent. My problem with them arose from another place: while other editors on the board saw them as ironic and even comic, I saw them as cynical. I won't go into the particulars, for the poems will appear in a future issue. I could have evoked the "over my dead body" rule that allows one editor to completely override the others. But I didn't because I might have been mistaken about the poems; I might have misunderstood their intent. Nonetheless, I came home dispirited--not because poems I don't like are going to appear in a journal I edit, but because I feel, in this task, that I can't rely on the reaction to reading that I rely on in my own private engagement with books. As a journal editor, I'm supposed to stand apart from the poem in some way, be dispassionate, yet I'm not good at dispassion. This means that I can't easily see the good in things that don't instantly move me, which is no doubt a flaw. Yet having depended for a lifetime on a close, personal, idiosyncratic response to what I read, I feel, in a way, as if I'm betraying a central creative impulse of my life.
Ah well. Back to the copyediting and the laundry and the driving-to-piano-lessons, to dry my tears.
2 comments:
I think I understand what you are getting at with the "I'm-a-poet-because-I've-enjambed-what-should-have-been-an-essay, -but-I-turned-it-into-a-poem" storyline.
Since I started going to readings- and listening to other poets, and reading more poetry, and my own students' poems- it's interesting to note that the best poetry (IMHO) is often that which is simple, yet heartfelt, which makes a point or observation complete, yet does so un-self-consciously, or with a minimum of fuss & malice.
Sometimes, I'll read journals or lit mags and think: they were trying awfully hard, and I just don't think I get it. Kind of like taking your child to a playground and hearing "Hey Ma! Watch me! Hey Ma! Look!" To which there is only one relpy, really: "Yes, dear, I see you."
Now dry those tears...why, it's cool enough to bake, here.
Good idea about the baking. As regards the poetry, I realize that anyone who has devoted 2 years to Paradise Lost clearly is not immune to the delights of aesthetic manipulation. But Milton had a moral mission, whether or not one buys into it. My problem with the submitted poems was that they seemed, to me, to work wholly on a cynical level. Perhaps, as was argued, they were persona poems. But if so, they were purposefully working to keep the persona-poet line ambiguous. Yes, that's an artist's prerogative. And yes, it can be beautiful. And no, I don't have to like it.
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