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

[jforjames at aol.com]

Tad, posted the link here...it's long:

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 


-----Original Message-----
From: Halvard Johnson <halvard at earthlink.net>
Sent: Sat, 15 Nov 2008 7:34 pm
Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Camlle Paglia explains how she saved poetry



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
=0
Apoem 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 intimidatedA
0or 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 
\


Instant access to the latest & most popular FREE games while you browse with the Games Toolbar - Download Now! 
_______________________________________________
New-Poetry mailing list
New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry





_______________________________________________
New-Poetry mailing list
New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry




= 


_______________________________________________
ew-Poetry mailing list
ew-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
ttp://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20081115/1cf14d89/attachment.html