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In which françois switches to a personal narrative mode ...


For our last seminar, an instructor (not telling you which one, but it should be easy, I only had two this semester) informed me that dismissing the return to formalism in contemporary American poetry (i.e., what gets published in Poetry Magazine), I was akin to dismissing a chunk of the electromagnetic spectru (okay, she might have said the visible spectrum). It would be as if I decided not to consider green or blue (both of which are boring anyway).

Fair enough, the metaphor is both apt and fallacious. Apt, because formalism in all its glorious boringness, represents only a small fraction of what is possible in poetry. Fallacious, because the visible spectrum only represents a small fraction of the electromagnetic spectrum, so why bother with only a small fraction of the possible. I'd rather play with X-rays than with red or green. Red and green are kinda boring actually.
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Sandra Simonds said…
MFA teachers are usually super lame. I always got down when people would say stuff like this to me. My other friends with more robust egos have told me that when someone says something like "poetry should be this and that" you take what you are doing and, do it 1000000000 times that and then you are set!
3:40 PM
François Luong said…
Hiya Sandra:

Yeah, the debate got very heated. i don't like being told what to read or what i should give a try. if i found an interesting way to write a sonnet, i would do it, like a soap opera sonnet corona for example.

I will say that Raymond Queneau has pretty much exhausted the sonnet form.
3:47 PM
Sandra Simonds said…
I don't think that writing teachers should tell you what to read---they should push you to read what you would have read if you were not so lazy. Why spend the day with Larry Levis when you can hang with Ted Berrigan, you know? (Unless you are a Levis kind of writer, and that's fine too).

But that's not a question of form. I don't write sonnets. That's because I can't make a good sonnet. But conservative writers always say--look! there's a sonnet! what a tradition! go and read that sonnet...

when the only thing that's traditional about the sonnet is its reinvention through spans of centuries and countries.

But I've always found that writers find their way into my reading life---it's not always about me looking for them.

Good luck!
5:52 PM
François Luong said…
Well, writing teachers might point you to poets you might like. I wouldn't have discovered August Kleinzahler if not for Tony Hoagland.

But yeah, it irritates me when a sonnet is presented as subversive when a. it's just reheated Elizabeth Bishop shit, b. it was written after Berrigan's sonnets and feels awfully tame compared to Berrigan or Queneau.

Quite frankly, I am very bored by sonnets too.
6:05 PM
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