A note on easy sophistication, facile sententiousness and idle chatter (11.4.22)

I've been reading pieces from Essays One, a fat volume of the reviews and criticism of Lydia Davis. Davis is a short story writer and translator. She participated in the grand Proust project of a few years back, providing the translation of Swann's Way.  She has also translated Flaubert, Foucault and Michel Leiris, among other great (and hard to read) French writers. Her short story metier is the Really Short Story - what we call today micro-fiction.  

You can guess from this last fact that Davis favors robust language and figures, not just in her own work but in the larger world of arty literature.  She writes admiringly of Rimbaud and John Ashbery, Raymond Roussel, as well as high-art writers I'd never heard of before opening Essays One: Samuel Menache and a poet named "Sparrow."

I've just been reading her reviews of two books of poems by Rae Armantrout, the West Coast Language poet; and while I can't say that I agree with her opinions and assessments of this writer, I am grateful for what she says about the poet's style:

". . . there is no such thing as glibness about her [writing]. Glibness is a town thousands of miles away from San Diego. As is Easy Sophistication, Empty Lyricism, World-Weariness, Facile Sententiousness, Idle Chatter.

I like the world-weary, facile glibness of this statement. And I can use it sometimes at Wednesdays@One. For this group's poems can often veer into the glib, the easy, and the empty. Not because we are egotistical writers or are lying to ourselves about our own writing, but because we are, to a poet, largely unlettered in the art.

What we know, what we think we know, about poetry comes mostly from each other (and too often, alas, from me), from the internet, and from our own narrow reading histories. I don't mean to denigrate my fellow writers' poems, or my own literary eye and ear, for that matter.  We're all much better at this stuff than any of us was five years ago, when W@1 launched.  But even a glance through Davis' essays shows how narrow our readings really are in comparison to the broad and deep (and voracious) literary education of a writer like Lydia Davis.

Essays One is just a reminder of how much groundwork there is to prepare for anybody who wants to become a good writer.