A poetic language that features a lot of shifts of tone and register, a lot of surprises, will be perceived by some to be mostly uniform in tone, relatively unvaried. At least by me, sometimes. *Objectively* the poetry can be demonsrated to be varied and surprising, yet I tend to hear only one predominant tone. It's kind of hard to explain.
THANK YOU! You just validated my review of John Olson's Oxbow Kazoo which is causing a brouhaha over at Verse. Maybe you won't agree with my arguments in panning the book, but at least with this post you've singled out the primary thrust I was trying to make. Now only if I had said it as simply and directly. Damn.
ResponderEliminarI feel this way about Dean Young, say. I was making more of a statement about myself as a reader, but there may be other readers like me.
ResponderEliminarI hear you. word games are not Catullus. nor Rilke.
ResponderEliminarWhat I think I meant was that rapid shifts of tone can be assimilated into a larger tonal category of "whimsy." Having a lot of variation, then, can lead to a kind of paradoxical flatness. Differences in tone stop meaning what they should mean.
ResponderEliminar