tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20990868.post1446714357876294006..comments2024-01-29T10:50:15.619-08:00Comments on Modern Americans: The New Lyricrodney khttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10515711262628729312noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20990868.post-75721202924285405422008-09-05T08:54:00.000-07:002008-09-05T08:54:00.000-07:00Hey Rodney, hey Sam--thanks for the good words -- ...Hey Rodney, hey Sam--<BR/><BR/>thanks for the good words -- I realize what I meant to type on that post wasn't 'the reinvention of the "lyric," whatever that means' but 'the "reinvention of the lyric," whatever that means.' Whatever difference that makes.Mark Scrogginshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01431113440875342809noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20990868.post-77458434122999587142008-09-05T07:09:00.000-07:002008-09-05T07:09:00.000-07:00Hi Sam,Your comment, which gets Gizzi I think to t...Hi Sam,<BR/><BR/>Your comment, which gets Gizzi I think to the studs, reminded me of another aspect of his work that Scroggins points to: that “Catullus rewriting Sappho and Ben Jonson rewriting Catullus” quality you mention, which I left to one side in the post, but which Mark neatly describes as “love songs built on syntactic games.” Maybe that self-consciously game-like quality (vs. the “oops” effortless pop feel) is what’s helping to nudge things toward the video game? Grand Theft Canto??rodney khttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10515711262628729312noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20990868.post-82512297457727163692008-09-04T23:18:00.000-07:002008-09-04T23:18:00.000-07:00Yeah . . . "Lyric" is one of those annoying terms ...Yeah . . . "Lyric" is one of those annoying terms that gets used a lot because it means whatever you want it to. A lot of the time it just means "short poem," but why don't we just say "short poem"? A friend recently told me my poems were "lyrical", and then explained that term using a comparison to architecture with lots of ferny and fluty decorative moldings. But lyric could just as easily mean something very spare, stripped, fragmentary like Sappho, a LITTLE machine that gets a rhetorical urgency or illusion of directness from its shortness. I guess Sappho was writing pop songs, and one maybe useful meaning of lyric is "like a pop song," gets the job done in under three minutes and then you remember it, and it looks effortless. "Oops I did it again." I don't see any reason to feel guilty about that, but I guess that NEW word does look a little shifty.<BR/><BR/>I love Peter Gizzi's poetry, especially SOME VALUES, but I think sometimes it does end up feeling like a pop song or a music video, too bright, too clear, and over too fast. I wouldn't call him extravagant--more often too economical. There is a lot of nostalgia in his work, and a lot of ironic fake nostalgia, and a lot of nostalgically post-ironic ultra-sincere fake nostalgia irony, which at its best is all mixed up together and dead-on and funny and a little better than the best pop song even. At its worst it can feel pretty coy. A lot of his poems manage to be rather swift and precise bits of literary criticism, which I don't think of as being a traditional function of lyric, at least not self-consciously. But then you get Catullus rewriting Sappho and Ben Jonson rewriting Catullus. I don't know. Maybe next century we could try to make our poems less like pop songs and more like video games. (Is that the serial poem?)<BR/><BR/>Longass comment. Sorry. Yeah, THE POEM OF A LIFE is real good.Sam Lohmannhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10397027152999149624noreply@blogger.com