...it was once standard practice to locate the poem largely in the realm of reasoned discussion, and dive into the world of concrete description only to plunder it for illustrative exempla, metaphor and anecdotal evidence... 'Show-not-tell' is merely the dumb war-cry at the head of a more insidious movement which appears to be seeking the total concretization of the poetic line. It is, I think, a neurotic response to the otherwise reasonable observation that no one is listening. We have correctly perceived a bored and dwindling audience, but have instituted a manic and cheap attempt to keep them awake with the brain-candies of image, anecdote and metaphor... To get the air flowing through the poem again, we require the bravery of showing ourselves to be engaged in thought while in the act of writing: our abstract consideration of a subject immediately rebalances the function-to-content ratio in favour of the former. A poem is a lyric process through which we work out what we think... This approach might be a little controversial among those of our number who still claim that poetry is no place for notions, and effortlessly succeed in their attempts to write poetry entirely free of them... The weirdly persistent assumption that poetic speech is more effective when it is concrete and direct has been a musical disaster for the art form; worse, it has infantilised poetry by legislating against intelligent speech... I sense intelligent readers are becoming bored senseless with poem after poem full of expository, paratactic syntax: I saw this / then I saw that / and I had a think about this / and I felt about that / and then this happened. It patronises readers, and all but accuses them of being unable to follow the kind of mature argument only sophisticated hypotaxis can honour. Moreover, it declares that the poet has little interest in the kind of reasoning by which we make sense of the world and of our own experience: the poet becomes a mere camera... To put it in Piagetian terms, the results sound like the work of a mind stuck in the 'concrete operational' stage, as it appears to demonstrate no capacity for the abstract thought we associate with the later, 'functional operational' stage of development. In short, too many contemporary poems read as if they were written by unusually bright seven-year-olds.
—Don Paterson, The Poem
On technology (Stephenson)
The presumption is that the world is static—and basically hospitable—until we do something and thereby disrupt it. Which I don’t agree with at all. We live in an environment almost all aspects of which were engineered by our ancestors. The continents of Australia and the Americas, when discovered by Europeans, had been made over by systematic hunting, burning and gardening over tens of thousands of years, and didn’t exist in anything like a pristine state of nature. We live, and have always lived, in a completely manufactured environment. All we’re left with is the ability to choose between different technological strategies. It’s incoherent to point at one thing and call it a technology in contradistinction to the [implicitly non-technological] status quo ante.
Neal Stephenson
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