Comments on: Neko Case’s Flaming Hamster Wheel of Panic About Publicly  Discussing Poetry in This Respected Forum

By: Vivek Narayanan

Vivek Narayanan — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 05:43:49 +0000

That Case sure knows how to turn on the charm and act all innocent and vulnerable. She preempts us by making a thick skin of her own ignorance. I like the part you quote about “comfort us with its scariness”, that’s very true. But it’s a sly and devious essay too, taking shots at form, and at difficult poetry, arguing that poetry’s primary purpose is to comfort and not to disturb, trying to make like it’s poetry that’s playing too cool for her when in fact what the essay is clearly trying to show is that too cool, too no-nonsense, for a great deal of poetry. I don’t suppose she took out a subscription to the magazine? She wants poetry to walk all the way over to her and not the other way around. Compare this with Rorty’s heartbreaking version of a similar alienation, at the end of his life: he wishes he’d made more friends. Well, some poems would walk up to Neko Case, but many wouldn’t. She’d have to walk over to some poems if she wanted to know what was in them, she’d have to walk half the way or more. That’s just the way it is. It’s not that those poems are being haughty; rather it is that they are diffident.
O why am I going on about stuff everyone in this forum already knows. It’s just that I don’t think we need be either surprised or excited because a rock star happens to remember a bit of Shakespeare. I mean, good for her. Charlie Parker had Joyce way back when. Mingus had Patchen. Cecil Taylor has Olson. But then that’s another kind of music. Or is it. Anyway, the lady doth protest too much, methinks.
I really really like that quote from the Osbourne Brothers a lot, though. I also happen to like Anna Karenina, a book that takes a bit of sitting down. I like em both, what to do.

By: Robert Schwab

Robert Schwab — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 17:34:15 +0000

I wonder why Case’s comments, “We all have the right to poetry! How could I still think it’s for other people?” are a surprise to people who read Poetry magazine and poets who have sucessfully traversed the “academization” of the art.
I think that “high-art” attitude must be reflected off most poetry today in order to be published, which means reaching an audience at all.
I can almost hear the scratch on the chalk board when I read Case’s statement: “I get the sense they imagine their audience and want to comfort them.”
That does not seem to me to be the instinct of poets I read in Poetry magazine. Unless the audience they imagine is an audience of other poets.
I think the “slam” poetry movement of the last two decades was one manifestation of the democratization of poetry that Case now assumes is complete, or should be.
Yet I feel the doors are closing again, and that the main door has never been much opened, but only set ajar for a time. I hope, like Case, that is not true. Certainly, the other artists she lists as fellow poets, indicate there is poetry all around us, much like music.
That has to be the future of poetry, published or not. I just wish the publishing world would look more seriously in those poets’ direction for new art.

By: Simon DeDeo

Simon DeDeo — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 16:02:07 +0000

I think some of the blame — not all of it — for the idea that poetry is “for the smarties” lies with the absence of poetry from the high school curriculum. Poetry is I think encountered in the context of the University, and while I think the academization of the subject has been overstated, it’s still true that it gets considered as a kind of “higher art,” above the novel.
Cultures (such as Ireland’s and the UK) that have more poetry in the secondary schools don’t have this problem. Is there an American answer to Ted Hughes’ and Seamus Heaney’s Rattle Bag? Perhaps the Poetry Foundation could fund one; I bet if you got Harold Bloom and Marjorie Perloff to put down the knives for a moment they could do something great.
This remark of Rorty’s surprised me: “there is nothing about death that Swinburne and Landor knew but Epicurus and Heidegger failed to grasp.” Somehow it seems oblique to a lot of what Rorty wrote. I would have thought he’d come closer to the notion (was it Adorno’s?) that today neither philosophy nor poetry can be paraphrased. Something a little Platonic in that line, I suppose. But then Rorty was a bit like Putnam, he did like leading you down the garden path.
“Great audiences”. Mark Wallace and I chatted a bit about this on his blog. One of the best “writerly” pieces of advice from Jorie Graham was the assertion that to be better poets, writers need today to become better readers — of their own work just as much as the work of others. I think one of the “failure modes” of the contemporary poem is a (mis!)underestimation of the power and intelligence of the reader.

By: Henry Gould

Henry Gould — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 14:41:01 +0000

The remarks you quote by Richard Rorty reminded me of this passage, which I came upon by chance last night (while looking for a different tome) in a fine book on Dante by Marc Cogan (The Design in the Wax) :
“For Dante, poetry possesses a special moral capacity and appropriateness. . . A poet does not merely report the truths of philosophy or theology; a poet embodies these truths in the characters and actions of the poem. In doing so, the poet takes one step beyond philosophy, investing these truths with emotion and passion, insofar as we see the truths literally enacted in the events of the poem. And it is precisely because poetry is the embodiment of action, and is therefore suffused with emotion, that it is so perfectly adapted to moral instruction. The embodiment of poetry provides the emotional impetus that makes it possible not only to understand but also to act upon doctrine.” (p. 283)

Comments on: Neko Case’s Flaming Hamster Wheel of Panic About Publicly Discussing Poetry in This Respected Forum

By: Vivek Narayanan

By: Robert Schwab

By: Simon DeDeo

By: Henry Gould

Comments on: Neko Case’s Flaming Hamster Wheel of Panic About Publicly  Discussing Poetry in This Respected Forum