Pulling no punches …

… Canadian Poetry: A Long Way Down a Very Short Street > David Solway. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

With only a few notable exceptions, our scribbling classes favor talking over singing, replication rather than ceremony, kenosis in lieu of kerygma, mere dabbling over real innovation. Mirroring ordinary experience in commonplace diction, such work enacts a precise reversal of Stéphane Mallarmé’s celebrated quest for the crystallization of essence and nonreferential transcendence—his “l’absence de tous bouquets”—but it is too poorly armed to justify even in theory the mere reproduction of fact and the lexical trek to ostensible significance which it proposes. Moreover, whatever theory it draws on to justify its practice is invariably borrowed, from the Surrealists, Oulipo and the Imagists, from the New York School, from Black Mountain, from the Language School of the 1970s and Charles Bernstein’s A Poetics, or simply from the airy proclamations of the belletristic Zeitgeist. This derivativeness is the moving force and principle even among the putative avant-garde who profess to renew the idiom and renovate perception.