[New-Poetry] Adam Kirsch and Simollinsy

[Jason Quackenbush]

Don't misunderstand me to be saying it's not possible to distinguish  
between the three. From my own point of view, hostile as I may be, I  
actually buy books by Simic and I don't  hate Seamus Heaney although  
i won't spend money for him and his beowulf was a bit of a joke, and  
Billy Collins just makes me angry. But as a fan of country music,  
hell, as the former lead guitar player in a honky tonk band, I will  
still say that Merle Haggard isn't all that different from Johnny  
Cash or George Jones if you've also heard Iggy and the Stooges.  
They're not even all that different if you're at all familiar Billy  
Joel. And that's all just pop music. My point is that on the broad  
spectrum of contemporary poetry, selecting a range that starts with  
Simic and ends with Collins is pretty limited and makes the statement  
that precedes it seem pretty ill informed. By analogy the statement  
"[contemporary] music has a distinctive metaphysics, a set of  
intuitions and principles shared by artists as diverse as Dwight  
Yoakam, Willie Nelson, and Shania Twain" is just as idiotic as the  
one in that article. If a music critic said something like that,  
particularly right after a comment about how broad his listening is  
[kirsch:"The more widely you read, in fact, the clearer it  
becomes..."] he'd lose every informed reader he had before they read  
the rest of the paragraph. What makes me cringe about the  
contemporary poetry world is that you can make such a sweeping  
statement about "our poetry" and still be taken seriously by people  
who care about poetry and get such a statement published in one of  
the most venerable and widely read publications in the field. Say you  
can find a common set of intuitions in poets as diverse as mIEKAL  
aND, Anis Mojgani, and Ted Kooser and then back it up, then maybe  
you're in a position to talk about what this period is going to go  
down as being about in literary history.

Of course what follows is pretty uninformed as well.  the statement  
"For Heidegger, more than any other philosopher, looked to poetry as  
a model of what thinking should be." Wittgenstein, Heidegger's most  
important contemporary, once wrote "Philosophy ought only to be  
written as a form of poetry." Great philosophers of the nineteenth  
century like Nietzsche and Kierkegaarde  and Emerson (quoted later in  
the piece, and given his important influence on Heidegger it's  
entirely possible is the root of the Heidegger account of poetry) all  
took poetry as a starting point in different ways. Even back to the  
very beginning of western philosophy you find extensive references  
and allusions to Homer in all of Plato's longer works and many of his  
shorter ones.   And then in the rest of the essay comes his thesis,  
which as becomes clear is based on the narrow spectrum of mainstream  
poetry, is also based a reading of an early period Heidegger essay  
which, while I haven't read the particular essay myself, I highly  
doubt is correct. Much that is fundamental to Heidegger's philosophy  
is either misunderstood or ignored in the way Kirsch bungles his  
"poetry of earth/poetry of the world" distinction. To put it another  
way, this rubric does not sound like something that emanated from the  
Heidegger I'm familiar with who published Being and Time less than  
ten years prior. To then draw from this that "our poetry" is a poetry  
of earth, given to the poet being a neutral observer, is certainly  
true of the brand of poetry that gets published in Poetry Magazine,  
but I can write you a list as long as my arm of good contemporary  
poets who write "poetry of the world" as Kirsch has it, which to me  
seems an indication of precisely how widely Kirsch HASN'T read, and  
which makes his narrow "Simic/Heaney/Collins" spectrum of "our  
poetry" seem rather telling.

For me, that article did little other than reconfirm the reasons I  
don't take that particular periodical or its editor very seriously.

-Jason Quackenbush

On Jan 29, 2008, at 6:50 PM, David Graham wrote:

> I'm with Finnegan.
>
> It's easy to say that Heaney, Simic, and Collins aren't very  
> different from each other--just as Merle Haggard isn't that  
> different from Johnny Cash or George Jones--a statement that makes  
> perfect sense if you are basically unfamiliar with or hostile to  
> country music generally.  I regularly meet people who are, come to  
> think of it.
>
>
> ---------------------------------------
> I don't have any trouble discriminating between the three: on  
> style, typical subject or approach. But then?I read a lot.?And,  
> David, how can poetry be consumerist when almost everyone agrees  
> it's hard to it?give away? Even poets like this unlikely  
> triumverate could only be said to 'sell well' by 'poetry standards'.
> Finnegan
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: jfq at myuw.net
> Bcc: jforjames at aol.com
> Sent: Tue, 29 Jan 2008 7:27 pm
> Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Heidegger and poetry
>
>
> i was just going to respond and say that I didn't know Heaney Simic  
> and Collins were all that different from eachother. but you have a  
> point as well.?
> ?
>
> ========================================
> David Graham
> grahamd at ripon.edu
>
> Home Page:
> http://web.mac.com/drjazz/iWeb/Site/About%20Me.html
>
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