For
Jim Leftwich, the boundary between poetry and criticism, or more accurately,
between poetry and writing about poetry, is extremely porous. This book should
make that very clear; in fact, here it is sometimes hard to tell whether a text
is “original poetry” or his writing “about poetry”. Which suggests that the
distinction may not be all that important. (Another such book is one he wrote
focused on my own work, or using my work as a springboard, Containers
Projecting Multitudes: Expositions on the Poetry of John M. Bennett, 2019.)
This is perhaps an outgrowth of his practice of making “hacks” of others'
poetry and texts, which is in itself a means of entering into, and remaking
aspects of, another's work, using a wide variety of processes ranging from the
arbitrary and deliberate, to the improvisational and purely intuitive. What
this does is to turn the process of writing about poetry on its head. Instead
of applying a preordained critical method or theory to a text, Leftwich
presents, as it were in “real time”, an account of what it was like, of what
happened, when he read the text. We thus have a narration of a real experience
of reading. For me, and for many of us in this new literary avant garde, this is
vastly more interesting and useful than the use of a text to support or
illustrate a particular literary (or other) ideology. Leftwich's work in this
regard is unique, exciting, and represents real progress in the “problem” of
“how to read poetry”, and of how to write it as well. -¬ John M. Bennett
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