[New-Poetry] Camlle Paglia explains how she saved poetry
Halvard Johnson
halvard at earthlink.net
Sat Nov 15 21:54:22 EST 2008
Thanks for the link, James. Not a long one, though,
compared to some links I've seen.
Hal
"Go ahead and look for God, but
tie up your camel first."
--Sufi proverb
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 7:08 PM, JforJames at aol.com wrote:
> 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. Wh ite
>
> 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 discove r how few of his poems
>>> can stand on their own in today’s media-saturated cultural climate.
>>>
>>> -- Tad Richards
>>> \
>>>
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