Friday 9 October 2009

what do you think of this?


A little perspective on page versus stage.
What does this look like written down? I'm not sure how long I could listen to poems in this genre. Call me a traditionalist but I do feel a poem has to be good first then second well performed.

From jacket magazine

Christian Bök's wildly experimental book Eunoia is the bestselling book of poetry in Canadian history. In fact, when the British edition of the book was released last year around Christmas, it hit the UK top ten list, just under Barack Obama! Most of Christian’s readers are not poets at all; they’re just folks who are stunned by the achievement of his book. Christian is a populist and an avant-gardist; someone who shows us that these two don’t necessarily need to be oppositional.

This one might be words. How would it read?

1 comment:

Ossian said...

I hate it. He could read The Waste Land in that manner or a telephone directory and it would sound the same. I knew by the suit and tie that I wasn't going to like it. Whatever little merit might be in the texts is impossible to discern through the noxious fug of the reading. I suspect from what I could make out there are a few rhymes and word plays and that's about all. Good to know that the bestseller list hasn't lost its ability to identify most of the most clunking turkeys.