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Panel 4: Drawing from the Past/Breaking from the Past
This late in the day, the panel topic seems too close in nature to the first two. Isn’t it revealing that three out of the four panels dealt with some variation on the topic of influence, lineage, tradition—because the crisis in representation of the canon is so problematic? Because there are so many different poetries that all claim some purchase on the history of poetry in English?
Each poet spoke on what she or he had to do battle with: for Frank Bidart, it was the idea in the late ‘50s that the model was a Marianne Moore poem. “And I knew if that was a poem, I couldn’t write it.” For Rita Dove, it was the idea that for a black woman, it was predictable that she would love Langston Hughes but not that she would love Goethe. For Sharon Olds, it was the Calvinist Christianity of her childhood, which she had thought she renounced by writing disobedient poems—until she realized after twenty years that her four-beat lines were haunted by church hymns. Finally, Gerald Stern cited the downtrodden postindustrial American city—Pittsburgh, Philly, New Brunswick, Easton PA (“a rubbish heap”)—and a preoccupation with “the bastards that ruined the lives of the people in those cities.”
*
I didn’t go to the reception. Like Whitman after the Learned Astronomer spoke, all I wanted to do was look up in perfect silence at the stars, or perhaps read Frank O’Hara’s exalted, inexplicably gorgeous ending to “Ode to Michael Goldberg (‘S Birth and Other Births):”
yes! for always, for it is our way, to pass the teahouse and the ceremony
     by and rather fall sobbing to the floor with joy and freezing
     than to spill the kid upon the table and then thank the blood
     for flowing
                         as it must throughout the miserable, clear and willful
life we love beneath the blue,
                        a fleece of pure intention sailing like
a pinto in a barque of slaves
                       who soon will turn upon their captors
lower anchor, found a city riding there
                       of poverty and sweetness paralleled
     among the races without time,
                         and one alone will speak of being
     born in pain
                       and he will be the wings of an extraordinary liberty
Posted in Criticism, Group Blog on Friday, October 26th, 2007 by Ange Mlinko.
Comment (1)
Vendler has a great piece on Dove’s poetics (I forget the title of the book, I think it’s about poetic maturation? — ah I thought it was in Breaking of Style, but actually it’s an essay in Soul Says.) I don’t know if it’s too blah to mention, but I think Harold Bloom really has the number when he talks about the kind of misreading that poets do. The idea that one “transcends” tradition I think is not correct; poets do their best work when they wrestle with a powerful, oppositional force — one that provokes. It’s not a friendly action.
I think poets react to events and texts that exercise power illegitimately. It’s the response to that illegitimate event that counts — and it’s a response that rests crucially on the assertion of original illegitimacy.
Poets are a bit like the dynamos on the Hoover dam.
I suppose that’s why I’m left non-plussed by the connection to the canon debates in the academy, which seem to be about something else entirely. Poets make implicit political statements all the time, but rarely by their choice of wrestling partners. Indeed, Rita Dove’s reaction — I’ll challenge who I want — is one I’ve heard many times by writers who are also minorities (I remember a great talk by Anthony Appiah), although of course that reaction has been co-opted by conservatives.
PS: When I was a kid I (and my British accent) moved to the States and discovered that there was some Saturday Night Live skit that involved a song about Simon? People would come up to me and sing it like they were the first person to think of doing so. Now that my accent is gone, the song has been replaced by references to Whitman’s astronomer!
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