F, S, and A

Altieri's framing of the problem of contemporary poetry as being the difficulty of skillfully navigating the distances between public language and private experience, the private evoking the broadly shared public, is sort of amazing. She articulates almost exactly what I feel are both strongest and weakest points of Strand's work, the former being when he's addressing the largest of issues in a language and point of view that seems especially private, evoking, for me, Beckett (The Remains), and on the other hand when that private language seems to be perhaps too private and borders on melodrama because of Strand's insistence on rendering the matter and its significance on an almost purely private matter (Shooting Whales), or rendering a feeling as being so public that it loses its particularity by way of generalities (The Long Sad Party). Strand seems within our reading to fall in with Forche on this point, where the problem is one of lyric closure, but because his subject seems so much more particular or enclosed/and so broader in terms of its subject (less viable as a political movement or political history), his closure seems to run less risks in terms of self-satisfaction coming at loggerheads with political or emotional efficacy (by which I mean only that his kind of closure is more easily digested since it makes fewer claims as to the truthfullness or efficacy of its witness, whereas Forche, I think, would have us believe that her poetry is a kind of activism). It's an odd thing to say that because Strand's work stresses its historical particularity less and rides instead on the persona of an individual dealing with private losses that it seems to risk less, but when successful the treat is in the poem's seeming universality. If Forche seems self-satisfied she risks aestheticizing the violence that she writes against; if Strand does the same he risks only being self-satisfied with his persona or with himself, and we can easily, when this occurs, relegate the poem back to the scene of its private matters rather than have it stand at the pulpit of the public, whereas with Forche if we condemn her poems as too private, the setting and their subjects demand that the reader take Forche to task for pretending to witness while talking only about herself.