[New-Poetry] Camlle Paglia explains how she saved poetry

[jforjames at aol.com]

I didn't have a chance to read the whole piece till yesterday, and it looks like I'm of the minority viewpoint, but I think that Paglia did a good job defending the poems she picked for her anthology. Opinion is all critics have in the end...there is no proof as I said today after reading the piece: http://ursprache.blogspot.com/
She laid out her opinions on poetry quite nicely, I thought. (And she's obviously not intimidated or held hostage to careerist niceties so much that she's dissuaded from expressing displeasure at 'name poets'. Which I find refreshing.) 
The other thing I think this piece points to is how much the 'anthology pieces' we know come to us as received icons.
The poems are not questioned. Not interrogated. They were taught to as 'canonical' or a certain poetry interest group
 has 'vested' them and they go on, living-dead zombie poems pushed forward through time without question,
Finnegan


-----Original Message-----
From: TheOldMole <Opus40-01 at opus40.org>
Sent: Tue, 11 Nov 2008 10:08 pm
Subject: [New-Poetry] Camlle Paglia explains how she saved poetry


http://www.bu.edu/arion/Paglia16-2.html 
 
I was shocked and disappointed by what I found. Poem after poem, when approached from the perspective of the general audience rather than that of academic criticism, shrank into inconsequence or pretension. Or poets whom I fondly remembered from my college and graduate school studies turned out to have produced impressive bodies of serious work but no single poem that could stand=2
0up as an artifact to the classic poems elsewhere in the book. The ultimate standard that I applied in my selection process was based on William Butler Yeats’ “The Second Coming,” a masterpiece of sinewy modern English. 
 
Ezra Pound, because of his generous mentoring of and vast influence on other poets (such as T. S. Eliot and William Carlos Williams), should have been automatically included in /Break, Blow, Burn/. But to my dismay, I could not find a single usable Pound poem—just a monotonous series of showy, pointless, arcane allusions to prior literature. The equally influential W. H. Auden was high on my original list. But after reviewing Auden’s collected pxoetry, I was stunned to discover how few of his poems can stand on their own in today’s media-saturated cultural climate. 
 
-- Tad Richards 
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