I enjoyed reading this exchange. I haven't read the book (though I get a sense of it from the quoted excerpts) but I wanted to comment on this particular section of the conversation:
Menos: I’m probably too cheerful / churlish / literal / short tempered to appreciate her.
Nelson: But now you’re doing that thing we all tend to do, blaming your lack of response on yourself, rather than identifying a lack in the work.
I wonder if there's a bit of projection going on here? By which I mean some poets, especially those with a penchant for making ethereal, gnomic, rather untethered utterances have a tendency to make their readers feel a bit literal/earthbound/lumpen/dull/dim. I think Rilke can be guilty of this at times, for example.
It's as if some poets, unable to tolerate something about themselves or about the nature of human reality, have a need to reach upwards, thereby leaving those lame souls below to wrestle with the very feelings the poet can't accept in themselves.
Of course poetry needs to fly at times. And maybe Chang is a frequent flyer. Or maybe something else is going. I should read her book. Anyway, just a thought.
I'm in the middle of moving house, so there's limited time and energy to respond fully. But as I read the quotations you use, I was immediately struck by the closeness to Buddhist experiences of absolute and relative reality. Then I discovered that she was brought up in a Buddhist family. At this level it all makes sense, and I'm very much looking forward to reading the collection.
Goodness! What hard reading work! I think Chang's poems are awful. They read very much like Alicia Pirmohamed's poems. They aim to sound profound but have little meaning and less sense.
I enjoyed reading this exchange. I haven't read the book (though I get a sense of it from the quoted excerpts) but I wanted to comment on this particular section of the conversation:
Menos: I’m probably too cheerful / churlish / literal / short tempered to appreciate her.
Nelson: But now you’re doing that thing we all tend to do, blaming your lack of response on yourself, rather than identifying a lack in the work.
I wonder if there's a bit of projection going on here? By which I mean some poets, especially those with a penchant for making ethereal, gnomic, rather untethered utterances have a tendency to make their readers feel a bit literal/earthbound/lumpen/dull/dim. I think Rilke can be guilty of this at times, for example.
It's as if some poets, unable to tolerate something about themselves or about the nature of human reality, have a need to reach upwards, thereby leaving those lame souls below to wrestle with the very feelings the poet can't accept in themselves.
Of course poetry needs to fly at times. And maybe Chang is a frequent flyer. Or maybe something else is going. I should read her book. Anyway, just a thought.
I'm in the middle of moving house, so there's limited time and energy to respond fully. But as I read the quotations you use, I was immediately struck by the closeness to Buddhist experiences of absolute and relative reality. Then I discovered that she was brought up in a Buddhist family. At this level it all makes sense, and I'm very much looking forward to reading the collection.
Goodness! What hard reading work! I think Chang's poems are awful. They read very much like Alicia Pirmohamed's poems. They aim to sound profound but have little meaning and less sense.