John Donne, 1837
"Of his earlier poems, many are very licentious; the later are chiefly devout. Few are good for much."
Henry Hallam, Introduction to the Literature of Europe
Reviews originally compiled by Bill Henderson in Rotten Reviews.
Category: Poetic Realities (Page 7 of 9)
Hart Crane’s The Bridge, 1932
"A form of hysteria…One thing he has demonstrated, the impossibility of getting anywhere with the Whitmanian inspiration. No writer of comparable ability has struggled with it before and it seems highly unlikely that any writer of comparable genius will struggle with it again."
Yvor Winters, Poetry
Emily Dickinson, 1892
"An eccentric, dreamy, half-educated recluse in an out-of-the-way New England village—or anywhere else—cannot with impunity set at defiance the laws of gravitation and grammar…Oblivion lingers in the immediate neighborhood."
Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Atlantic Monthly
Reviews originally compiled by Bill Henderson in Rotten Reviews.
Perusing a local-paper poetry-themed insert I came across the mention of a new essay by Tony Hoagland called "Twenty Little Poems that Could Save America" from Harpers magazine: http://harpers.org/blog/2013/04/twenty-little-poems-that-could-save-america/
I support the idea of revamping the way we teach poetry in secondary schools and in college. Poetry has slipped outside of mainstream culture and there are many reasons for this. Baby steps back may involve rethinking the cirriculum, something many forward-thinking teachers are already doing. Hoagland wants to use more contemporary poetry and has created a list of poems he believes "the kids today" can relate to.
I anticipate resistance to this idea (so does Hoagland) and I think it goes back to poets worrying that their favorite poems will be lost forever. This fear actually hides another bigger very secret fear that someday their own (future famous) poems might also be judged out-of-date, old fashioned, or just not modern enough and therefore doomed to be forgotten as the new poems and poets continually roll in and take over. Perinneals entombed in concrete will prevent this slippage.
But Hoagland loses me when he goes off on pop culture. In the beginning he says "Culture is always reanimating itself" and then goes on to say celebrity culture is "a kind of fake surrogate for the culturally significant place gods and myth once held in the collective imagination….just as junk food mimics nutritious food, fake culture [fake culture??] mimics and displaces the position of real myth. [Real myth???] Real culture cultivate our ability to see, feel and think. It is empowering. Fake culture [again, fake culture??] makes us passive, materialistic and tranced-out."
First of all, obviously mainstream movies and music can cultivate our ability to see, feel and thik and are also empowering and can encourage us to be active and not passive. To argue otherwise is to be willfully ignorant. Not to mention there is no such think as an unreal or fake culture. Culture is what it is. Football, Kim Kardashian, violent video games, expensive cars and shoes…that's the culture now. Like it or don't like it. What you think of the prevaling culture is irrelevant. It reanimates regardless of the judgements on it from you or me.
But then Hoagland goes on to appreciate Glengarry Glen Ross and Citizen Kane. The thing is, nobody can be the judge of what is is specifically that moves someone else. It's not fake. It's just not your thing.
Anyway, we shouldn't throw out the baby with the bathwater. This essay continues the ongoing conversation about the role of art in schools and how we can better teach an appreciation of poetry.
I'm sure it will elicit many petty 20-poem list wars among poets battling it out for supremacy. But for those of us on the ground, a good weekend reading list if nothing else.
I’m really behind on my poetry periodicals but I want to mention that there are a lot of good essays in the American Poetry Review (Nov/Dec 2013).
They published a controversial essay by Joy Katz on sentimentalism and the absurd lengths we’ve been trying to avoid it. At least that's how I took the piece. I heard through another writer-friend that Alicia Ostriker (who’s book Stealing the Language practically changed my life), was upset by how the essay used her as an example, thinking she was being criticized for sentimentalism. This is not how I interpreted the essay at all. Joy Katz really drags you through the drama of sentimental-avoidance in efforts to please current avant-guarde practitioners; and I can’t see why she would do this if not in defense of sentimentality ultimately as a choice.
Katz re-enacts the writing of a poem where a baby appears:
“A baby turns up in a poem I am writing…Oh no… A baby has turned up in a poem I am writing. Fear the world enclosing it: too easy to inhabit, too pretty, too comfy, too female, too married, too straight. A poem with a baby in it is automatically possibly all of these things, no matter what I am in my life as a person…
A baby has appeared. Fear loss of world, loss of danger, loss of trash, loss of anger, loss of war, loss of surprise, loss of mattering, loss of dirt, loss of wildness, loss of scale, loss of geologic time, loss of continents, loss of rivers, loss of knives, loss of meanness. Lost: the chance to go somewhere that scares me…I am writing a poem about. A cloud of aboutness hovers over my draft….
(True story: In Paris recently, I read several poems with my young son in them. The work evinced a range of strategies, from fragments to collage to narrative to a lyric. An editor I was talking with afterward said, about the poems, “I’m not interested in content. Do you know what I mean?”)…Fear of loss of credibility…
Can you not see the irony here? If the editor (or the avant-guard, for that matter) isn’t interested in content, what difference does content (the baby) make? It should be irrelevant; but it’s not. Here "I'm not interested in content" means "I'm interested in content."
“(Fact: When a male poet writes about a baby, he is not accused of being “overwhelmed by biology.”[1] Fact: One of my teachers told me and a couple of other women that we should never write about our kids. I later realized he wrote about his kids.)”
Katz's essay is both aesthetic and political and yet understated, unsentimental. It dosen't draw absolute conclusions but it raises doubts. Maybe this is how it could be misconstrued.
In this APR there is also an email conversation between Gerry LaFemina and Stephen Dunn on the topic of irony that goes into length debating whether irony exists in the Tom Lux poem “Refrigerator 1957,” a debate I enjoyed very much because Lux was my “don” at Sarah Lawrence College. We all heard him read that poem about ten times while there. We even used to impersonate his performances of it just like we impersonated Marie Howe saying “the plumber I have not yet called” from her very serious poem “What the Living Do.”
Kids having fun in the 1990s.
There's also an essay by Jane Hirshfield, an amazing piece about (in defense of?) the power of lyric poetry, speaking to “the inexhaustibility of existence itself” and therefore the inexhaustibility of the lyric. She even takes on Theodor Adorno. You go, girl!
There’s also a conversation with Philip Levine. Levine was the first famous poet I ever saw in the flesh, when he arrived one night for a reading in Slonim House at Sarah Lawrence College. I’ve been starstruk since. In today’s political climate, I’m developing a deeper taste for Levine just as I am for songwriter Billy Bragg.
By the way, for some amazing out-of-the-box poetry, I would recommend the 1998 album of Wilco/Billy Bragg taking unpublished Woody Guthrie lyrics from Guthrie's family archive. Two nights ago, Monsieur Big Bang and I watched the documentary on the making of the album.
I also enjoyed poems in APR by Joe Wenderoth. And of course I loved the three Stephen Dobyns poems in the issue because I always love Stephen Dobyns poems a bit shamelessly. His poem “Sincerity” was particularly good in light of our ongoing debates about lyric poetry and writing from the "self."
A poet friend of mine from Sarah Lawrence College (now living in Los Angeles) recently sent me an envelope full of newspaper clippings and I’m enjoying reading and discussing them with him via email. One he sent me was the following piece from the LA Times, “No, Margaret Atwood Will Not Blurb Your Book”
I really wanted to like this article when at first I assumed she would be forsaking blurbs on her own books; but the article was only about how she was refusing to give out anymore helpful blurbs to other authors.
A more revolutionary act would be for her to eschew blurbs on her own book covers. I mean, is she taking and refusing to give (just because she’s so busy)?
I get it that published authors are unbelievably busy and can’t keep up with these requests. I even respect Ringo Starr for recently notifying the fans of the world that he won't be signing autographs anymore. Totally acceptable because he’s not out there asking anybody for autographs. If you can't keep up with requests, then silently not keep up with requests. That's all you need to do. Why make a grandiose statement about it?
Blurbs are cliquish, overblown statements of meaningless PR, part of anyone’s book marketing plan; and we’ve been conditioned to believe we need them on our books and to convince us that a book is worthy of reading. If Atwood’s career was helped in any way by book blurbs (and it's hard to believe it wasn’t), it doesn't mean much to me that she's now refusing to give out blurbs. It’s just uncharitable and bad vibes. Speak out against the system at least while you're at it.
My friend told me it would take courage as an author to go blurb free. And yes it would.
Irked as I am with Atwood, I did add her to my Pinterst board of poets with sexy hair.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge Review, 1828
"We cannot name one considerable poem of his that is likely to remain upon the thresh-floor of fame…We fear we shall seem to our children to have been pigmies, indeed, in intellect, since a man as Coleridge would appear great to us!"
London Weekly Review
"His versification is so destitute of sustained harmony, many of his thoughts are so strained, his sentiments so unamiable, his misanthropy so gloomy, his libertinism so shameless, his merriment such a grinning of a ghastly smile, that I have always believed his verses would soon rank with forgotten things."
John Quincy Adams, Memoirs
Chaucer Review, 1835
"Chaucer, not withstanding the praises bestowed on him, I think obscene and contemptible: he owes his celebrity merely to his antiquity, which does not deserve so well as Piers Plowman or Thomas Erceldoune."
John Byron, The Works of Lord Byron
Charles Baudelaire Review, 1953
"In a hundred years the histories of French literature will only mention (this work) as a curio."
Emile Zola, Emile Zola
Matthew Arnold Review, 1909
"Arnold is a dandy Isaiah, a poet without passion, whose verse, written in surplice, is for freshmen and for gentle maidens who will be wooed to the arms of these future rectors."
George Meredith, Fortnightly Review
I am now having a hard time not imagining all those gentle maidens scrambling to drag their fingernails through those side-burn forests. I was so impressed with them, I added Arnold to my Pinterist page of Poets with Sexy Hair.
"Mr. Auden himself has presented the curious case of a poet who writes an original poetic language in the most robust English tradition but who seems to have been arrested in the mentality of an adolescent schoolboy."
Edmund Wilson, The Shores of Light
I know, that's what I like about him!
And what a face. Try to carve that in glass, Paul J. Nelson.
Last Friday I met my cousin at a Santa Fe used bookshop going out of business (he refuses to sell online, via mail and his prices were too high). I did buy a stack of books there, a biography of Marcel Proust, a book of celebrity poetry (to be reviewed here later) and two books called Rotten Reviews which are flabbergastic gold! I'll cull out the poets for you.
The first review I found was for Sylvia Plath's book The Bell Jar from 1971:
"Highly autobiographical and…since it represents the views of a girl enduring a bout of mental illness, dishonest."
Atlantic Monthly
I'm gonna love these.
