[New-Poetry] Ogden Nash & Paul Verlaine

[David Graham]

"For me, the thorny word in the title of this book is not "best" but  
"poetry" because I am rarely sure of what we are talking about when  
we talk about poetry. Serious discussions of poetry commonly imply a  
very narrow definition of the genre. When I hear it is said that  
"poetry... is about the extending of human consciousness, making  
conscious the unconscious, creating a symbolic consciousness that in  
its finest moments overcomes all the dualities in which the human  
world is cruelly and eternally... enmeshed," I wonder if that would  
include Alexander Pope's "Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot" or the Yukon  
poems of Robert Service. When I read that "poetry's perpetual  
direction is its way of ensouling events, of seeking the doubleness  
in the events, the events' hidden or contradictory meaning," I get  
the feeling the writer did not have in mind Chaucer's ribaldry in  
"The Miller's Tale," Swift's vituperative "The Character of Sir  
Robert Walpole," or Ovid's "The Art of Love," where advice on the  
bedding of women is happily offered. Can Catullus telling Minimus  
that his girlfriend is the cheapest whore in Rome be "ensouled"? So  
much poetry-traditional and contemporary-falls outside the circle of  
such discussions that we might pause in our awareness of how small an  
area is circumscribed by such high-sounding, presumptuous critical  
talk. Many vital poems are excluded for being too ludic, satirical,  
insufficiently hallowed, or for coming up short in the sensitivity  
department. But they are poetry, too. In fact, such a wild hodgepodge  
of verbal activity takes place under the heading "poetry" that the  
term has been stretched beyond its ability to be defined. Can Ogden  
Nash and Paul Verlaine be expected to sleep soundly in the same bed?"

--Billy Collins.  from the introduction to *Best American Poetry*, 2006.
==========================================
David Graham
grahamd at ripon.edu
Home Page:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
Poetry Library:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/poetrylib.html
==========================================



-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20061208/cb70babb/attachment.html