Odds and Ends Essays, Blogs, Internet Discussions, Interviews and Miscellany

think I’m just talking about taste: you may have your own poets who you like thoroughly, and those you can only
really like some of. My question is: do you? And do you like the ones you really like for their mode, or for their work,
exceptions and all?
A “use of connotation that is strictly controlled”-I do think Heaney wants to be suggestive, and not just to a strict
and limited set of connotations. I maintain I don’t find it interesting often, but I think the same mode would produce
connotation not so strictly controlled, and still be good. But I regret implying you said that, I was picking up
McKendrick taking a general drift of your piece as saying Heaney is not connotative, but I still see Heaney sitting
there, wanting to write it all down, allude to the unsaid when saying the said, to say a lot. I don’t like the poems much,
but I don’t see that as the fault of the mode.
Ron Silliman once said that the weakness of Finnegans Wake was that there wasn’t play of connotation, but that
Joyce knew every connotation he intended. Which seemed a bizarre thing to say. The re-introduction of the
intentional fallacy. I’m sure Joyce sometimes and often guffawed and said, ooh, nice extra pun, what a lucky
confluence. Heaney does too, just doesn’t write as well…
Ira, here are my responses:
Jeffrey Side’s Second Response
April 2009
‘Can you provide an example, though, of an accessible poet whom you like?’
This is a difficult question because all poetry is accessible to me. If I don’t understand a poem I free associate from
individual words and phrases until a meaning that is personal to me evolves. If you mean what poets do I like who
limit connotation to allow for an obvious surface meaning, then, I would say none. For me, poetry has to have many
levels.
‘I don’t get what’s wrong with novelist poetry, Pound wouldn’t be against it’.
Yes, Pound did advocate something akin to descriptive poetry at various points in his writings, but I am not holding
him up as an ideal for connotative poetry.
‘I don’t think queer = abstruse, and did not think you did’.
I don’t, and don’t think I said so.
‘I think you’re wrong that Heaney’s some kind of Daily Mail reading advocate of their kind of “normality”.
Did I say that? I used the word “commonplace”, in relation to his use of the quotidian aspects of existence, be it farmlife
or some other intrinsically natural setting. His critical writings advocate this sort of poetry.
‘I think your emails are lovely, and that you treat me really respectfully and warmly, ditto with Marjorie; but I
maintain my point that neither of you are fab at tenderness in your polemics (and I still love reading them)’.
Thanks, but I have never really thought that tenderness was a requirement in polemics. Of course, one should always
strive to avoid personal abuse, but it is often the case that when one is writing a polemical article, the tone may seem
abrasive, but that is the nature of the form.
‘I don’t think I’m just talking about taste: you may have your own poets who you like thoroughly, and those you can
only really like some of. My question is: do you? And do you like the ones you really like for their mode, or for their
work, exceptions and all?’
The only poets I like from the past 100 years are Eliot, Dylan and Ashbery (and Kerouac, in parts). I like them
because they use language allusively. Other poets and songwriters do this also, but these four do it to my satisfaction.
145