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

[Halvard Johnson]

And those living-dead zombie poems live on the entrails
of the living, so beware and be afraid. Be very afraid.

Hal

"Information cannot argue with a closed mind."
           --Mike Nichols and Elaine May

Halvard Johnson
================
halvard at earthlink.net
http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard/index.html
http://entropyandme.blogspot.com
http://imageswithoutwords.blogspot.com
http://www.hamiltonstone.org
http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard/vidalocabooks.html


On Nov 15, 2008, at 5:34 PM, JforJames at aol.com wrote:

> 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, wh  
> en 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 up 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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