neoneoclassicalism

sometimes I just want to do something silli, man! (wow metasilliness)

has anyone else noticed how augustan our time is? we’ve got ourselves a large, powerful empire flexing its muscles, in which much poetry is created with conscious artifice (of course, this is more an attitude thing; it takes as much work, perhaps more, to construct poetry that looks natural or organic), a sense of the importance of community, and the poetic appropriation of other discourses. much as pope improved homer and virgil, poets like flarfists today improve google and other discourses. sometimes this is done in high seriousness, like some of those working in “language” poetry’s wake, while at others in a satirical vein that swift wouldn’t have been too upset about.

people talk about “formalism” as if there could be such a thing as formless poetry, but it is the foregrounding of form and associated linguistic devices in a lot of contemporary poetry (I’m thinking of recent poetry's creations of new forms; e.g. hejinian’s My Life; tranter’s haquiris; or those hay(na)kus, sure they're generally not hard forms to write within, but then again, after pope hit his heroic straps, I’m sure it wasn’t that difficult for him to turn out couplet after couplet) that makes me think of the augustan mode. if there’s anything like a little relevance in what I’m saying, why are important and wonderful poets like alexander pope generally still overlooked in favour of the romantics and modernists? is it our fear of obvious, regular rhyme? does it just sound too childish or monotonous for us?

rhyme is still important to so much poetry being written today. even the most minimal stuff, like saroyam’s lighght, utilises and plays off this ancient poetic device. other old things like this are just as important. perhaps a.d hope was right in saying (in his great little essay, "the discursive mode") that we just can’t hear the beautiful, supple, baroque music in the heroic couplet form as well as the Augustans themselves could. the infinite variation caused by slightly different placings of the caesura, the amazing tension caused when syntax is pushed against the balance imposed by the couplet; all this isn’t simple or boring. I think we’re living in quite an augustan age, and maybe it’d be good for us to look more at – engage and sometimes maybe even enjoy what those poets were doing back then.