[New-Poetry] Adam Kirsch and Simollinsy

Wed Jan 30 20:24:01 EST 2008

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.

On Wed, 30 Jan 2008 jforjames at aol.com wrote:

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> Jason, I wouldn't say I'm a big fan of Kirsch's criticism/reviews, but I do think he's doing good work getting reviews and criticism published in high-visibility places. Certainly, as I said to Skip, I'd agree that Heaney-Simic-Collins (all very different in many ways, which was my point) certainly don't cover the waterfront of contemporary poetry.
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> On the philosophy-poetry nexus, I tend to agree with Kirsch about Heidegger's important position. Wittgenstein certainly speaks to poets in many ways, but in his oblique way. Kirsch?could have mentioned Schopenhauer, Bergson, Cassier, Bachelard, Langer, etc. He chose Heidegger and I can't fault him for that. His attention to Heidegger, and?Heidegger's intense attention?to Van Gogh's painting is best part of the essay. The rest is a serires of reaches. But that's what essays are all about, the reach.
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> Finnegan
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> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jason Quackenbush <jfq at myuw.net>
> Bcc: jforjames at aol.com
> Sent: Tue, 29 Jan 2008 11:47 pm
> Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Adam Kirsch and Simollinsy
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> 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 !
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> 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.?
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> 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 particu!
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> r 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.
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> For me, that article did little other than reconfirm the reasons I don't take that particular periodical or its editor very seriously.
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> -Jason Quackenbush
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> On Jan 29, 2008, at 6:50 PM, David Graham wrote:
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> I'm with Finnegan. ?
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> 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.
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> 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'.
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> Finnegan
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> -----Original Message-----
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> From: jfq at myuw.net
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> Bcc: jforjames at aol.com
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> Sent: Tue, 29 Jan 2008 7:27 pm
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> Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Heidegger and poetry
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> 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.?
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> David Graham
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