Despite the affirmative, vital presence of imagination, that playground area is situated at a great distance from experience. It is distinctly externalized. Distance is as much the distinctive feature of the poems as play; distance, which might be seen as antithetical to that other enterprise of poetry—strong feeling.
Fear of Narrative and the Skittery Poem of Our Moment, by Tony Hoagland.
Hoagland doesn’t come back to distance as an important feature of contemporary poetry, but it seems like an important shared feature of both dissociative and narrative poetry. Distance can be as useful as elusiveness in avoiding “the potential embarrassment of sincerity.”
And yet many dissociative poems make bold assertions about the world, sometimes assertions that seem simplistic and cliched — say, about consumerism or Republicans. Is skepticism about sincerity really a motivating force for skittery poems? Maybe in part, or maybe it’s just a constraint of the form — dissociative poems might make it more difficult to think about a topic in movements of thought longer than a single declarative sentence.
