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

[Halvard Johnson]

Btw, I meant to ask where the Paglia piece appears. I may have missed  
the
first mention of it.

Hal

"A discouraging number of reputable poets
  are sane beyond recall."
                          --E. B. White

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 6:26 PM, Halvard Johnson wrote:

> Maybe you mean that nothing INTERESTING can be proven, James. Of  
> course,
> value judgments can't be proven, whether related to poems, poetry,  
> or anything
> else. Nor can another kinds of judgments. They can be supported, of  
> course,
> but men can be hanged based on judgments that, like any other  
> judgments, cannot
> be proven.
>
> Back in the day, when I was teaching, I used to try to get writing  
> students beyond
> the quick and easy judgments that all too often blocked further  
> consideration of a
> poem by asking them to start with what they saw in a poem, rather  
> than what they
> thought about the poem. There are factual matters: e.g. length of  
> lines, number of
> beats, number of words, presences of tropes of various kinds. (Not  
> that even the
> number of words might not at times be a matter of judgment rather  
> than fact.)
>
> Of course, one of the things good critics (even student critics)  
> ought to know is
> the difference between matters of fact and matters of opinion or  
> matters of
> judgment.
>
> Ergo . . .
>
> Hal
>
> ". . . the old is too old and the new is too old."
>                               --Gertrude Stein
>
> 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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