Thursday, June 25, 2009

Anti blurb wars part two

this was sent to me, it's a non Australian Press's blurb:

The press locates itself an as intellectual space where forms and intuitions make writing a process of risk and otherness—a space where the high stakes of creative inquiry make self-effacement impossible. @@@@ fosters work that investigates the dimensions of place, whether construed as location or situation. Such work is... able to survive in swamps and sandhills, to thrive in salt and heat, to occupy an imaginative landscape that is raw and abrasive and to expand its territory toward the interior. Neither cynical nor rhetorically meek, the work is concerned with but not limited by the map; its logic is global, written against the grain of history and biography.

what does that mean? The press locates itself an as intellectual space where forms and intuitions make writing a process of risk and otherness—a space where the high stakes of creative inquiry make self-effacement impossible.it could mean so many different things. If an over surplus of possible meanings results in meaninglessness, then this can mean whatever the writer wants it to mean on any given day depending on how hot the coffee is.

I expect waffle in art galleries. You've had the experience where you're standing there looking at a photo of a dead rat with two burnt twigs shoved up its arse and you need that a4 page "artists statement" beside it to tell you that (once you've waded through the inevitably turgid, tautological and almost hilarious swamp of perverted syntax and thesaurus spew) that this is actually a shattering indictment of the patriarchal discourses of post something capitalism. You need it because if you're stupid and visually illiterate like me without the 'artist's' statement you'd be thinking you were looking at a picture of the mutilated corpse of a dead rodent. You might even start thinking that the thing was indeed an indictment of the system; a system that allowed people to do that and think they were doing something worth your attention. You might even start thinking that it is indeed an indictment of capitalism that people can make money out of such bolloxs.

But isn't poetry supposed to be about the precise use of language? When we read yet again that poet x is "reinvigorating the language" or "exploring the possibilities" or "using the resources of language in a unique way" when the blurb hails yet another unique voice, I think we have every right to ask "How? Be explicit"
Post Joyce, Beckett, Eliott, Pound et al.. what hasn't already been tried?
Perhaps the one thing that doesn't get tried that often is the making of sense when talking about poetry.
Neither cynical nor rhetorically meek, the work is concerned with but not limited by the map

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