I know who poetry can't accommodate: the tourist. I don't mean it is necessarily more highborn than shell art, though the effort, the ardor of it goes toward being borne up. But I believe it can't be identified with the compulsion to shop instead of the desire to touch, be touched.
—C.D. Wright, Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil (Copper Canyon Press, 2005)
erotics of art
What is needed, first, is more attention to form in art. If
excessive stress on content provokes
the arrogance of interpretation, more extended and more thorough descriptions
of form would silence. What is needed
is a vocabulary—a descriptive, rather than prescriptive, vocabulary—for forms.
The best criticism, and it is uncommon, is of this sort which dissolves
considerations of content into those of form.
[…]
Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a
work of art, much less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already
there. Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all.
The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works
of art—and, by analogy, our own experience—more, rather than less, real to us.
The function of criticism should be to show how
it is what it is, even that it is
what it is, rather than to show what
it means.
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In place of hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.
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