[New-Poetry] Adam Kirsch and Simollinsy

[jforjames at aol.com]

I think that diletantism cuts both ways. We're all diletantes to some degree. Wittgenstein was a diletante when it came to poetry. FR Leavis will tell you that. Perloff, I've read. She's good. She's not a philosopher. So she's a diletante at philosophy. So am I. Though I'm pretty good at risk management for financial institutions. Few can be good at everything

Finnegan


-----Original Message-----
From: jfq at myuw.net
Bcc: jforjames at aol.com
Sent: Wed, 30 Jan 2008 8:24 pm
Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Adam Kirsch and Simollinsy



I think the point is that criticism ought to reach a little bit better. If one is interested in a good example of applying 20th Century philosophy to poetry, I don't think you could do much better than Marjorie Perloff's "Wittgenstein's Ladder." Here you find a careful, thoughtful critic spending real time trying to understand what it is that the philosopher thought, and then tracing the influence of that thought through real works by people where there is a definite lineage to be shown. While on the other hand, the connection between Heidegger and the poets named by Kirsch seem to me to be very tenuous and almost coincdental, even if you take kirsch's reading of heidegger to be accurate when to me it appears to bear all the hallmarks of a non-specialist being sloppy and inconsiderate in a field that's not his own.?
?
So what we have here is an essay that 1, claims to speak about all of contemporary poetry from the wide experience of the critic but plainly fails to do that and also calls into question how wide that experience is 2, claims on the basis of a dubious reading single minor paper a sweeping influence on mainstream poetry by a major 20th century philosopher, but fails to do that and 3, Goes on to condemn in the same terms of the former misreading all poetry that is not of the type lauded in this minor essay by a major philosopher.?
?
That to me is not the good criticism, just self-aggrandizing dilettantism.?
?


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