Does Poetry Matter? I respond in a new book...
Years ago, upon the invitation of an American poet and thinker I admire, H.L. Hix, I participated in a project that was originally a blog chain called “Progressive Poetics.” (It still exists: just go to https://www.hlhix.com/inquire/ , and click on the “Progressive Poetics” button in the right-hand column.)
It pleased me to find in the mail, yesterday, a book version, called Counterclaims, out from Dalkey Archive.
Hix invited 'many of the most influential voices in contemporary poetics' or more than one hundred and fifty of his fellow writers, scholars, and artists to address whether the old truths inherent in 20th-century poetics can still be adhered to today.
Specifically, to respond to two well-known statements about poetry:
W.H. Auden's Poetry makes nothing happen composed at the beginning of World War 2
&
Theodor Adorno's To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric
written in the aftermath of the Holocaust.
Counterclaims is a kind of conversation sparked by these incendiary remarks and it is the editor's wish that you will "find provocation in the book: ideas to embrace, to contest, to chew on."
