[New-Poetry] Camlle Paglia

[David Graham]

I don't despise Camille Paglia either, though I disagree with her  
often enough, and find her style sometimes offputting.  *Break, Blow,  
Burn*, the bestselling book of poetry criticism in question, is a  
worthy book.  Considering it, I'm struck by several things.   First,  
when was the last time a book of serious poetry criticism was a best  
seller?  I can think of a few recent ones that seemed fairly popular,  
though I don't know how their sales might compare to Paglia's:  books  
by Edward Hirsch, Molly Peacock, Robert Hass (collection of his  
*Washington Post* columns), and not many others.  So that's one thing  
worth pondering, and celebrating.

Second, a glance at Paglia's table of contents would, in fact,  
support Bob Grumman's objections.  For the most part, despite  
Paglia's strident puffery and posturing in support of her project,  
she's picked little but safely canonized classics to analyze,  
beginning with Shakespeare's sonnet #73, and progressing through such  
cutting edge figures as Donne, Herbert, Marvell, Blake, Wordsworth  
Shelley, Coleridge, Whitman, Dickinson, Yeats, Stevens, Williams,  
Roethke, Lowell, Plath, et al.

The only oddities come in the very recent picks, who include four  
relative unknowns (Chuck Wachtel, Norman H. Russell, Rochelle Kraut,  
and Ralph Pomeroy) plus Wanda Coleman and Joni Mitchell.  Otherwise  
it's pretty much Nortonized classics all the way.

I don't think it's *bad* to have yet another book dissecting  
Shakespeare's sonnets and Williams's overexposed "Red Wheelbarrow,"  
but it's hardly earth-shaking stuff.

For my money, Paglia's taste is ever more uncertain as she moves into  
the contemporary world, too.  That's no doubt true of most of us, of  
course.  She's pretty damn good on Shakespeare, Whitman, and so  
forth, but I don't find her as convincing on Wanda Coleman, for  
instance.

And Joni Mitchell, whose "Woodstock" lyrics close out the book, seems  
an odd choice.  Not that Mitchell isn't a great songwriter, but why  
this song?  Why not a thousand others?  Why no song written in the  
past 40 years, for that matter, if you're going to make a gesture at  
being hip and write a book of poetry criticism specifically aimed at  
general audiences?   Poor Paglia reminds me in this regard of the  
minister of the church I attended as a kid in the 1960s, who tried to  
reach out and be "relevant" to younger people in his congregation by  
quoting Simon & Garfunkle lyrics in his sermons.  Kids who were, of  
course, listening to Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, and The Doors at the time.

As far as I can tell, all but 6 of the 43 poets in the book are dead;  
and even most of the recent poems are at least 30 years old.  It's  
possible to take Paglia at her word, and believe that she read  
intensively of work published in the past few decades and found  
almost nothing worth analyzing; it's also possible to doubt how hard  
she looked at anything that wasn't already published when she was in  
grad school.

Among other things, I would have appreciated a fuller discussion of  
why she didn't just focus on Shakespeare et al.;  or, failing that,  
if she was determined to make some token gestures toward the  
contemporary world, what factors went into her choices.  Has she read  
Yusef Komunyakaa and found him wanting?  If so, why?  No masterpieces  
by Richard Wilbur, Philip Levine, Seamus Heaney, Elizabeth Bishop?   
Is Wanda Coleman really better than Hayden Carruth, Charles Simic,  
Lucille Clifton, Albert Goldbarth, Robert Duncan, James Wright,  
Robert Hass, Philip Larkin, Adrienne Rich. . . ?

Still, such a book does no harm, and gives snipers like us a good  
target.  And I for one am pleased to see a prominent critic going  
back to good old new-critical close reading.  Despite Paglia's  
posturing, that probably *is* a somewhat radical move these days.   
This might be a good book to assign in college classes, in fact:  it  
has the moves.



========================================
David Graham
grahamd at ripon.edu

Home Page:
http://web.mac.com/drjazz

Poetry Library:
http://web.mac.com/drjazz/iWeb/Site/DGPoLibrary.html
==========================================




On Nov 18, 2008, at 9:14 PM, Bob Grumman wrote:

>
>> Because a book of poetry turns up on the bestseller list, is no  
>> reason to despise it.
> I was going to let your post go in peace, Russ, but the above  
> statement gave me pause.  At first, I thought, of course, no reason  
> a poetry best-seller ought to be lousy.  Second thought: has there  
> been a poetry best seller in the last fifty years in this country  
> that wasn't either loaded with the masterpieces of yesterday or  
> absolute crap?  But I don't despise this one, I despise its  
> publishers.  As I've said, repeating my boilerplate forever.  We  
> have enough "good poems."  Let us have an anthology of kinds of  
> poems never before in an anthology printed in editions of more than  
> a thousand--edited by someone who knows something about poetry..
>
> --Bob
>
>
>
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