[New-Poetry] Billy hates 'cicadas'

[TheOldMole]

I think he's dead on.

For a while I was sort of on a blues panel circuit, invited to be a 
participant at blues festivals in panels on "Whither the Blues?" For the 
most part, the panelists offered the opinion, expressed variously that 
the blues are alive, the blues are flourishing, the blues are entering a 
new era of greatness. I was always the grouch at the party, saying, "No, 
they're not." I said, and I believe, that the 20th Century was the 
American Century in music, the flowering of a  magnificent art form that 
can hold its own in the company of Renaissance art, Elizabethan drama 
or  Baroque  music.  But all great periods in art come to an end. 
There'll never be another Louis Armstrong, another Robert Johnson, 
another Chuck Berry.

I was pretty much of a lonely voice on this one. But what was fun was 
when you asked those blues-are-flourishing, blues Renaissance guys about 
people who were currently popular, like Jonny Lang, they would recoil in 
exactly the way David Lehman describes.

James Cervantes wrote:
> On 8/17/07, jforjames at aol.com <jforjames at aol.com> wrote:
>   
>> http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article/article?f=/c/a/2007/08/03/DDH5RBT9Q2.DTL
>>
>>  Jon Carroll
>> Friday, August 3, 2007
>>  There is always ferment in the world of poetry, probably because there is
>> rarely money in the world of poetry (absent the eccentric bequest), so
>> turmoil is the only recreation available. Here David Lehman, the general
>> editor of the Best American Poetry series, lays it out in his preface to the
>> 2006 edition:
>>
>>  "Some poets share a resistance to popularity - other people's popularity,
>> above all - though they might bristle if you called them elitist. It's a
>> problem that afflicts all of us to some extent. We say we want real readers,
>> who buy our books as an act of choice, yet should one in our party escape
>> the poetry ghetto, we tremble with ambivalence, as if having real readers
>> means a sure loss in purity."
>>     
>
> He has a point.  Most of my readers seem to be virtual.
>
> -- Jim
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
> ~ Salt River Review:  http://www.poetserv.org
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> ~ http://home.earthlink.net/~jvcervantes/
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>   

-- 
Tad Richards
http://www.opus40.org/tadrichards/
http://opusforty.blogspot.com/