I'm not sure my position on triviality can be defended. How can I say that a certain kind of poetry is aesthetically trivial? For me it's the idea of bathos: we get a build-up, an idea that a certain kind of poetry is super important, central to something, and then we get the poem itself...
Don't get me wrong: bathos is my favorite trope, when used intentionally.
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An example: I was reading something by Rothenberg, and he refers, quite earnestly, to Carlos Castañeda, the worst kind of new-age charlatan.
There is political bathos too, which I won't get into right now. Let's say resisting Trump (a good idea!) but in a gesture that seems trivial, however meaningful and earnest it is to the resister. Let's order a Canadian beer today! That'll show em.
2 comments:
That seems to me to be a particular case of a more general problem: some articles begin with long sections on theory and/or secondary literature, yet those sections are largely disconnected from the subsequent sections on primary texts.
This is not really a disconnect between the two sections of the paper, in my mind. The paper still coheres, perfectly, but the poetry just doesn't rise to the level it should.
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