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Futures, Options, and Swaps (the weblog of Alan DeNiro)

Now I’ve lost two posts in a row. So I give up.

Thu, October 21 2004 » Meta/Logistics

Trent October 23 2004 @ 9:36 am
I know how that feels-imagine you’d stayed up all night blogging one blog, but you never saved it. Bummer.
Trent October 23 2004 @ 10:12 am
I don’t know if you meant for anyone to read your earlier, albeit less-polished post about speculative poetry and Jake Barry (I’ve got a syndicated feed from Livejournal), but I thought I might respond anyway.

I have no ostensible problems with whatever directions poetry may go in, but as I mentioned before with jazz, it can become so obscure as to become alienating. In a sense, Barry’s choice of language mimicks Eliot’s densely allusive “The Wastelands” so any criticisms of that work of Eliot’s applies.

As for Ashbery, a talented poet, I find he works on such an edge of consciousness that he does not want anyone inside. Perhaps the feeling of feeling (of feeling?) is enough, but this stand-offish stance of keeping the reader at arm’s length does not completely warm.

On the other hand, there can be too much lucidity that we see there’s nothing there. I don’t, however, think that’s the main problem with speculative poetry. I think the main problem is having far more knowledge of speculation than of poetry.