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SOURCE: “Smarts,” in Poetry, Vol. 159, February, 1992, pp. 282–98.
In the following excerpt, Baker provides a mixed assessment of Singularities.
Poets these days want us to think they are smart, it strikes me as I read much of the poetry written in the last few years. If the decade of the Seventies favored the shorter lyric and the Eighties became a decade of narrative extension, then the Nineties are shaping up as an age of discourse, of poetry infused and sometimes laden with obvious smartness: the Poem Thinking. That's certainly a preferred rhetorical method, one of the most common stances, among poets currently. I think, therefore I instruct.
This should not be an altogether surprising development, given the circumstance of a dramatic number of poets these days. They teach. But perhaps the current instructive and discursive modes may be explained by considering other matters, too. Perhaps poets are articulating a...
This section contains 1,336 words (approx. 5 pages at 300 words per page) |
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