[While the following extract is about poetry in South Africa, I think there are strong similarities to current photography. ]
“… In a situation where I recently began to teach to undergraduates the work of some of the post-1990 local poets who interested me, I came to ask class after class why they were so wary and flummoxed when attempting to engage with innovative poetry. The answer, from students of different backgrounds and viewpoints, was unvarying. They had been taught poetry at school in a way which presumed each poem was a coded artifact of `culture’ beyond their own understanding and experience: poetry lessons were excruciatingly boring procedures where teachers sought to `sensitize’ their minds to ape lofty ideals of sensibility and to unlock already existent meanings. They were taught that the workings of poems were intangible; separate from their quotidian lives, concerns and enthusiasms. …”
“… It is striking the degree to which local innovative poets have also had to struggle against a view of poetry similar to (and perhaps derived from) the `Movement’ poets in Britain in the 1950s: a poetry of polite humanism and suburban irony that eschews `grander themes’, that does not engage with theory and does not attempt too much imaginative wrestling with language, subjectivity and form. Indeed, it can be argued that much of South African poetry — and certainly a great deal of white poetry, even today — shows the characteristic retreat from modernism discussed here. It is especially striking that, in this country, this is as much a refusal to deal head-on with, and accept, the urban environment in which most poets live as it is to engage with global innovations in aesthetics. There are many readers in this country, perhaps, who have become bored with the rote publication of poems exhibiting what Andrew Johnson, reviewing recent South African poetry aptly calls “`I, I, I and random domesticity all the way” — an expressive, personal poetry intent on positioning the reader, along with the narrator, to gaze at various geographical (often natural) locations so that the poet can mouth off about his or her perceptions, sorrows and strivings for insight, as if these were in themselves interesting to anybody else. …”
- taken from a 1997 Rhodes University (SA) page of poetry reviews, the one quoted being Kelwyn Sole’s review of New British Poetries: The Scope of the Possible. Scroll down to about the sixth paragraph to find my quotes.
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If you have time, I would recommend scrolling down the page linked above to find Paul Wessels review of several poetry books. The full review is … entertaining. Here is an extract:
“I don’t like any of this poetry. Confession — so often used in personalised lyric poetry — can amplify ego and soon criticism of the poems becomes criticism of the poets. You can’t help it. For example, most of the poets under review here have problematic relations towards women. It’s hard not to notice it. And to state this is neither a feminist ruse, nor a prudish retreat. It is offensive purely because so embarrassing to read, as we will see later. More broadly speaking, and I am loathe to go into this at all, there is a collective emotional stuntedness shown by these poets, and it compromises the poem time after time. As I said, it’s really none of my business, but it’s made my business. A conspiracy of sameness….”
-Julie
