[New-Poetry] Paglia's Broken Blow

[Anny Ballardini]

Probably, I also noticed her tendency to dig up archetypes and swim in them
voraciously. I also noticed her (coda di paglia, this is a good one) "tail
of straw" (paglia = straw) [an Italian saying to show someone has touched
you in your weak spots, a tail of straw can easily catch fire]
when she feels she is going blindly beyond a commonly accepted border and
venturing into a soliloquy, be if for ignorance - be it for convenience, she
opens a bracket and explains_ what we do not know, but she thinks she has
thus satisfied the general public.


On Mon, Nov 17, 2008 at 5:29 PM, <jfq at myuw.net> wrote:

>
> paglia is too enamored of the metamythologies of joseph campbell and
> rolande barthes and it is a deep flaw in an otherwise astoundingly observant
> critical flaw. to this day i remain convinced that her best piece of work is
> the audio commentary for the Basic Instinct special edition DVD, where her
> weird obsessions with Jungian archetypes and elemental imagery actually
> dovetail quite well with the actual visual pallette of the film.
>
> I would hazard a guess that it's the lack of this sort of thing in the
> rejected poets (allusions to archetypes, elements, and so forth) that was
> missing in a lot of the contemporary poets she dismissed.
>
>
> On Mon, 17 Nov 2008, David Graham wrote:
>
>  It can be difficult to admire Camille Paglia, because she's so busy
>> admiring herself.  Nevertheless, *Break, Blow, Burn* is well worth a look,
>> and so is her essay on the selection process she went through in writing it.
>>  Here's the link again if you've lost it:
>>
>> http://www.bu.edu/arion/Paglia16-2.html
>>
>> Paglia likes to make sweeping provocative declarations, and I think she's
>> frequently full of crap.  Her taste strikes me as just as limited as, say,
>> Helen Vendler's.  But unlike many critics, she's also willing to do the
>> heavy-lifting of close reading.  *Break, Blow, Burn* is a book to savor,
>> argue with, bounce off of.  I also like it that she's willing to name names
>> and take potshots at what she feels are inflated reputations and silly
>> academic orthodoxies.
>>
>> Her backstage essay on reading for her book is fascinating.  I mean, she
>> reports being unable to find a *single* good short poem by Pound, Auden,
>> Moore, Creeley, Levertov, Jarrell, Rukeyser, Duncan, Berryman, Ashbery,
>> Rich, Kinnell, or Bishop!  That's rather breathtaking.  Nor was she able to
>> locate a single good poem on sports, which strikes me as ludicrous, given
>> the work of, say, Robert Francis, May Swenson, and William Matthews.
>>
>> Her close readings of poems that *almost* made the cut are most
>> intriguing.  I was a bit puzzled by many pronouncements and decisions.  For
>> instance, she bypassed Frank O'Hara's "Lana Turner Has Collapsed" for a
>> lesser-known piece, "A Mexican Guitar," which I did not immediately recall.
>> When I checked out that poem I just scratched my head.  It's a very
>> interesting O'Hara poem, but for a general reader?  It would be most
>> baffling, especially as compared to the Lana Turner poem.  Paglia typically
>> gives no real reason for her preference, and is sketchy on what constitutes
>> a good poem for general readership, beyond noting that Yeats's "Second
>> Coming" was her model:  "a masterpiece of sinewy modern English."
>>
>> Ultimately, Paglia seems best at nuts-and-bolts examinations of single
>> poems, and least convincing when she starts to generalize.  She also reminds
>> me frequently of Robert Frost's remark about never venturing forth unless
>> mounted firmly on your prejudices. . . .
>>
>>
>> ========================================
>> David Graham
>> grahamd at ripon.edu
>>
>> Home Page:
>> http://web.mac.com/drjazz
>>
>> Poetry Library:
>> http://web.mac.com/drjazz/iWeb/Site/DGPoLibrary.html
>> ==========================================
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
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-- 
Anny Ballardini
http://annyballardini.blogspot.com/
http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome
http://www.moriapoetry.com/ebooks.html
I Tell You: One must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing
star!
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