Chekhov's Mistress
Renau on David Caplan’s Questions of Possibility
J. S. Renau on David Caplan, author of Questions of Possibility: Contemporary Poetry and Poetic Form
“[He] is one of a new (or at least, fairly new) breed of academic creature who has studied under poets as well as literary theorists. I can’t say that this alone accounts for his good nature and earnestness, but it has informed his scholarship with a rare quality, a willingness to give both formal poets and those of the so-called avant-garde a fair hearing, without feeling an urgent need to pit them against one another.”
Not only do I like reading books on form – because they have the quality of explaining a secret handshake – but I’m one who never understood why formal verse could not more easily coexist with other poetic forms. Renau concludes:
“Caplan demonstrates a principle I’ve long asserted: formal verse is not the preserve of political conservatives, and by association, those poets who cut themselves off from their own poetic traditions based on their political conventions are apt to lose more than they gain. Caplan’s concluding chapter is a meandering exploration meant to put the verse/prose debates to bed once and for all, and while I doubt that will happen any time soon, his perspective and devotion is appreciated, or as he states it, ‘Prosody after ‘the poetry wars’ demands a less antagonistic, more nuanced model of creativity, one capable of acknowledging how writers echo even the ideas they dispute.’”
”The Rules of Subversion” Contemporary Poetry Review
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About this Post
- Posted by: Bud Parr
- Date: December 13, 2006
- Filed Under:
Wise Men Fish Here: Literature
- Comments:0
- Links to this Post: Technorati
