Sunday, May 16, 2010

Excerpts from L. Hejinian's Intro to Best American Poetry, 2004

What is best in American poetry is, finally, all of it, in all its modes and moods and themes and divagations. It is written and published against the logics dominating the times, and it flourishes---
...............................

The evaluations entailed, however, are variously motivated and variously contextualized...a history, but one that is heuristic in character, self-reflexive, arbitrarily completed annually, and always ongoing...(The necessity of querying and opposing one's "tastes")...

Powerful and engaged counters to the doleful state of the year...
Aggressive and/or overtly defiant works...
Fantasies (though not escapist ones) of alternatives...
Dislogical poems and dialogical ones...
Poems in which quixotic pathos is revolutionized into play...
Strange cosmological positives produced at unexpected points of encounter...

Art is all about living...
[poetry's] sources of energy
(it's virtues) are not frozen in
perfection but flow through
time as consciousness
and question.

It is precisely that kind of "bestness'---the common good of being lively---that I hope...
..............................

...a picaresque adventure...across innumerable sites and through diverse situations...This is a good story...it is rich in experiences and full of reality, full of world...

Reality, of course, always
exceeds even the best poems; there
is always more world than a writer
can create, or represent, or speak
of, or, even, reject.

...poetry is often fascinated by the unknown, which is often full of meaning. // Encounters with meaning (and with it, the sense of meaningfulness) bring with them the emotion of making sense, i.e., of discovering sense or, sometimes and with a stronger emotion, of having created sense.

...an inventive and activist role rather than a passive and consumerist one...

What interests
the artist is the working---
the interested living, not the dis-
interested spectatorship.

The desire that propels poetry propels us away from our "possessions" and forth into the world, replete with reality...

No comments: