[New-Poetry] Re: Changing of the guard

[pat foley]

On Tue, Mar 04, 2008 at 08:17:17AM -0600, David Graham wrote:
> In other words, I wonder if we tend to remember more of the  
> quietudinous stuff precisely because it's sandwiched between the  
> perfume ads, while we forget the poems by, say, Milosz and Syzmborska  
> that have also appeared as often as Deborah Garrison's.  It seems to  
> me that every time this discussion pops up, people tend to  
> conveniently forget Milosz and remember Oliver P. Flutterheart's ode  
> to his bird feeder.

Something else about that... Does anyone else wonder if the New Yorker
would have published Milosz if he were American rather than Polish? Some
people /seem/ to be much more broad-minded in their aesthetics when it
comes to imported goods rather than home-grown. There's the politics
too: a dissident Chinese poet can get a reception from the establishment
here that no dissident American poet would. Naybe I'm wrong. It just
seems there are circles in which it is easier and safer to embrace the
foreign rather than the local. All of which is by way of questioning
whether the quality of Milosz's poetry is what got him into the New
Yorker, published in translation by FSG or whoever, etc.

Pat