[New-Poetry] Camlle Paglia

Wed Nov 19 07:52:43 EST 2008

I loved this:

"Still, such a book does no harm, and gives snipers like us a good target."

On Wed, Nov 19, 2008 at 12:29 PM, Bob Grumman <bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net>wrote:

>  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
>
>  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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-- 
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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