[New-Poetry] Camlle Paglia

[Bob Grumman]

Kind of annoying to find just about nothing to argue with in a David 
Graham post, a /long/ David Graham post.  I /did/ find /one/ minor point 
to attack him on, though: he says, "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 . . ."  I say 
it's not.  If she had, she would have /had/ to have at least mentioned 
why she had dismissed not just the many superior poets she did but the 
many /kinds /of poetry she did. 

A second argument I have that she didn't do much of a survey of poetry 
to find poems for her book is not so convincing: it is that in choosing 
just about nothing but standards, and railing against modern taste in 
some area of art, she reveals herself as a probable rigidnik, and no 
rigidnik, by (my) definition, would be broadminded enough to have 
carried out a genuine survey of the field.

Nice that she picked something by Roethke, one of my favoritest 
favorites.  David, did she pick anything by Cummings?  If so, was it one 
of his visual poems.  I hope not!  It would make it harder for me to 
write her off.

--Bob


David Graham wrote:
> 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 <mailto: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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