Comments on: Why are poets aligned with the left?

By: Steve Tills

Steve Tills — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 20:21:28 +0000

Ditto, Henry!
And Thank you and All for Great Conversation. It’s a fabulous range of topics and I think that our generation(s) will be (rightly and smartly) continuing to explore it/them for some time.
Ciao, Steve
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By: Henry Gould

Henry Gould — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 13:37:46 +0000

I pretty much agree with you, Steve. I was just trying to answer Lucia’s question. Several other commenters here were trying to question the basis of her question. That’s fine too. Happy 4th of July.
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By: Steve Tills

Steve Tills — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 02:14:53 +0000

Henry,
Re: “politically centrist,”
If poetry is the antithesis of politics, then aren’t most very good pomers’ politics Not paraphasable,
the “particulars” of their politics always and ever, at least Ideally, Not Reducible to any party, any subscription, and permanent locating on any outside continuum?
If very good poets (i.e., ANYbody thinking, poming, really well in the moment) regard each and every politicizable (sorry, no time to speel coreckly just know) particular of human and earthly experience (including the “abstract” and the imaginary) special to its own Being. With CARE. With “love.” With Heart. With,
oh fuck you Steve — yer getting AWFULly sentimental and cliche, yep.
Seriously, though, we should not spend a lot of time categorizing our thinking, politics, etc.
Seriously, poming should should shoulda coulda woulda be “outside of” political USE, definition…
Seriously, now that would be divinely “liberal,” wouldn’t it? Pomers smashing politics to peaces.
Okay, nuff sad, sed, Sudafed-head.
P.S. And this is completely off subject, sorta, but anybody ever read Emerson’s great essay about
“liberalism” and “conservatism?” It’s not (exactly) the same “liberalism” we’re talking about here. It’s more a very rational and reasonable respect for the equally indispensable human qualities, human potentials, ideals, liberalism and conservatism.
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By: Michael Robbins

Michael Robbins — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 22:55:06 +0000

Henry, I don’t deny that it’s possible to be centrist. & I’m pretty sure that one my main points has been that, contra Lucia’s suggestion (which I recognize was tongue-in-cheek), you don’t arrive at any particular political position by “thinking” your way to the “truth.” In fact, it’s liberalism whose adherents assume if you don’t think like they do you don’t think. I’m pretty sure insisting on a distinction between “left” & “liberal,” whose importance Lydia has nicely articulated, is simply a socio-historical matter, no more a question of “thinking like I do” than if someone had conflated fascism & communism & their error were pointed out. Luckily, I am surrounded by friends & colleagues whose political affinities range widely, including some on the (to employ another completely misused term) libertarian right. It’s liberals who have arrived at the splendor of the self-evident truth of history, & shake their heads in wonder that past artists they admire could have had such boneheaded ideas. Do I think I’m right? Sure — just like everybody else. That doesn’t prove a thing about what I think people who don’t think like I do think.
Steve! You shame me, & I thank you. But let it be said that I never claimed to be consistent. & yes, “management of widow burning” (the working title of my manuscript) is lifted from Spivak’s work on Indian subalternity.
Peace & poetry to all, fer shizzle,
mr
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By: Doodle

Doodle — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 19:24:12 +0000

Some of this, let’s face it, is a little épater le bourgeois. But… yes, what Lydia said.
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By: Steve Tills

Steve Tills — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 19:14:02 +0000

http://www.lapetitezine.org/Michael.Robbins.htm
Well, I mean, for example, these lines from “Favorite zoo animal,” one of your poems, some of your poming, at lapetitezine.org. Only gotta read a coupla lines to know that I like it, your sensibilities:
The reword, and “funnin,” of Marx; the “why’s it Arkansas oh okay that’s cool” and then the neat “surprise” at the end with “maple porn” [my emphasis]; “velcro of small things” and certifying them, yeah, neat, and of course I’ve worn velcro golf clubs for 38 years; “Management of Widow Burning” may have been “a found poem,” or it’s Indian, where I think they still “burn brides,” so the good “feminism” (now, C’MON, MICHAEL, TELL ME THAT’S NOT “SOCIAL” AND TELL ME THAT ANY ABLE-MINDED YOUNG MAN OR WOMAN READING IT DOESN’T GET AT LEAST A LITTLE TINY FLICKER OF REINFORCEMENT FOR COURAGE TO OPPOSE SEXISM AND MISOGYNY; and the neat little riff “against” Creationism, placing it in “generations,” periods, etc., and coupling it with the notion, or ANY notion, of “logic,” again, Dude, we are poking fun at and pointing out holes in ill-conceived, unworthy, devolving, dying ideologies, aren’t we (and what’s wrong with that?); and last, the hilarious, maybe my favorite of the section, “You can’t smoke in here, this is America,” I certainly shouldn’t have to explain how funny this is and fun and why it’s so. Good, neat, intelligent, thoughtful, fun, knowledgable, and wise stuff – Poming. Smiles…
From a Michael Robbins poem I was reading:
A specter is haunting communism.
I think the lake reminds me of a wafer
bottled in Arkansas & shipped
with maple porn.
—
Left Behind to certify the velcro of small things
—antlers in our milk, the hen
that guesses our weight—
the hen that stamps our names on tin bands—
Management of Widow Burning,
or, The Cultural Logic of Late Creationism.
Steve
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By: Henry Gould

Henry Gould — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 17:05:21 +0000

Assumptions, assumptions… Lydia & Michael assume that if you don’t think like they do, you don’t think at all.
It’s still possible, in the US, to be politically centrist – that is, centered, very roughly speaking, between the positions of the 2 major parties. It’s possible to be centered on certain basic political values, like democracy, government by consent; rule of law; legal protection for persons and property; and so on. I, in turn, am assuming that Lucia’s original comments on “left” and “right” presuppose this center, from which the 2 parties diverge primarily on matters of social policy.
Michael, Lydia, and Noam Chomsky may uphold different political values and standards. That’s fine. It’s a free country. That’s what I think. This is not the same as thinking “alls’ right with the world”, which is what Lydia is accusing me of (in so many words).
As Reginald Shepherd likes to say – peace & poetry…
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By: Lydia Olidea

Lydia Olidea — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 16:41:59 +0000

I guess Michael’s point (aside from the fact that American poets seem to fall within the famously narrow spectrum of American party politics and not at any critical distance from it), is that the confusion of strong historical distinctions like that between “left” and “liberal” is not merely a nomenclatural divide, but an indication of the degree of political unawareness, centrist slippage, and casual sanction afflicting the group in question — no?
(Although Henry Gould’s cheerful urgency to not think about such things seems like an excellent example of Travis Nichols’ description of a poet serving the right. So perhaps he himself is a counterexample to Lucia Perillo’s original claim?)
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By: Michael Robbins

Michael Robbins — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 15:58:22 +0000

So, the thesis is that poets tend leftward, where “left” is defined as supporting the presidential candidate of one of the two major business parties — a man who will not rule out nuclear retaliation against Iran; who pledges to continue, in defiance of world opinion, U.S. support for Israel’s illegal occupation of the West Bank & Gaza; who wants to expand the role of religious institutions in government; &c.
What Noam Chomsky has to say about Obama is relevant to the confusion this thread is perpetuating (which is relevant to the confusion media discussion of presidential politics perpetuates): “Take Barack Obama, for example. In this morning’s New York Times, a front-page story reports his foreign policy stance, based on an exclusive interview. It opens by reporting that if elected he would offer ‘a possible promise not to seek “regime change”‘ if Iran stopped ‘acting irresponsibly’ in Iraq, stopped supporting ‘terrorist activities,’ and cooperated with the US on ‘nuclear issues.’ Not a promise, just a possible promise in reward for ‘good behavior.’ The threat of force is, of course, a serious violation of the UN Charter, but that seems not to be a matter of concern. The idea that Iran is ‘acting irresponsibly’ in Iraq can indeed be raised: on the assumption that we own the world, so that if we invade and occupy another country, any interference with our actions is ‘irresponsible.’ . . . [H]ow astonishing his statements are, except, once again, on the assumption that we own the world.”
So we can reformulate the thesis this way: Why are poets aligned with a set of assumptions about the world such that their support for a political figure who takes it as obvious that the United States should continue to act as if international law is irrelevant, bending other nations to its will by force if necessary, is seen as evidence of their occupying the left-liberal end of the political spectrum.
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By: Travis Nichols

Travis Nichols — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 15:55:23 +0000

Not to quibble (because that surely isn’t what blog comments are for!), but I put forth my thoughts on why more poets aren’t actively aligned with the right, not on why they are aligned with the left. I tend to think they’re mostly neither, which of course does not imply neutrality.
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By: Henry Gould

Henry Gould — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 14:40:07 +0000

Doodle, I suggest you start a blog – or perhaps a whole constellation of blogs – in order to properly analyze and dissect that Great Question – indeed perhaps the Greatest Question of the 19th and 20th centuries – “What is Left?” Best of luck in your endeavor!
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By: Doodle

Doodle — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 13:48:46 +0000

What Henry and Matt make clear is that voting for Obama makes you a leftist!
I can see why Michael would dispute this. I know I would.
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By: Henry Gould

Henry Gould — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 11:13:58 +0000

Michael,
Maybe you’ve had to repeat your assertion because the terms of discourse being used in this discussion are defined differently than you wish or imagine. I think Lucia’s definition of “left” in this case = “Blue State Democrat”. Now this may not accord with a true-blue socialist or social democratic or French Revolutionary definition of this term; but it’s the one Lucia’s using.
On that basis, I think a fairly strong argument can be made that poets and “visible” poetry culture in the contemporary USA are quite markedly “left”. Add up the blogs; the literary journals; the congruence of Democratic Party policy positions and groups such as “Poets Against the War” etc. etc., and you have a fair amount of supporting evidence. Of course, to really prove this you’d have to undertake some kind of statistical study.
Of course there is a much larger field of “poets and poetry” which we might call amateur or folk-art poetry – the kind of poetry which does not appear in established literary journals, newspapers, or commentary – and this larger field would be harder to identify with the left or right (as we are defining those terms here). There are also a fair number of “professional” poets who are on the political “right” – but I think they are outnumbered.
The statistically smallest group is made up of those poets whose only working approach to political oratory is ironic, reflective or critical. For this group, poetry and preaching-to-the-choir stand at opposite poles of public discourse.
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By: Matt

Matt — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 04:51:34 +0000

Michael, if you were to take a survey of 100 published poets, simply asking “Are you voting for McCain or Obama?”, do you really think the result would be anything less than 95% Obama?
Of all the poets you know personally, do you think there’s a single one voting for McCain?
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By: Lucia

Lucia — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 03:39:26 +0000

Whoa, Travis, I think it may be overstating the case (or wishful thinking) to claim that poetry could ever brew up enough steam to constitute a distraction.
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By: Michael Robbins

Michael Robbins — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 21:23:13 +0000

May I say, one more time, that poets aren’t aligned with the left?? I’m having a hard time understanding this thread. No one’s adduced a shred of evidence for the proposition that poets tend leftward at the moment, or once did so, or shall do so. They just don’t. You have to choose an anecdotally selected sample population to make the proposition even remotely credible. Not coincidentally, the sorts of poets posters on boards like Harriet are likely to know & read are soft liberals. (Not, I tire of pointing out, leftists.) This proves nothing about American poets considered as a general population.
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By: Travis Nichols

Travis Nichols — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 21:09:01 +0000

Though this thread has strayed fruitfully from Lucia’s original question–why are poets aligned with the left–it remains a great and largely unanswered question.
A thought that arose today was that there aren’t many poets actively aligned with the right because to ensure the goals of the right are met, a poet need only make sure his or her audience is not paying attention to the political machinations of this country.
By distracting and otherwise occupying the attention of readers, poets give their tacit consent to the current right-led wars. Current propaganda (from the right and left) has none of the obviousness a historical perspective lends.
Of course, what exactly the “political machinations” are, as well as what exactly constitutes “distraction” are complicated questions. But they are essential.
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By: Michael Robbins

Michael Robbins — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 15:49:20 +0000

Hey, Steve — You should see me during March Madness. &, yeah, yr points are well taken. I think I tend to take these comment streams a little too seriously. Better to think of them as an informal conversation, not subject to the strictures of a published debate or something. I’m very sorry to hear about yr heating situation & glad it didn’t happen in winter.
As for my poetry — many thanks if you’ve actually read it, but whenever anyone tells me they like my stuff I worry they’ve confused me (understandably) with Michael Robins (one b), my colleague at Columbia College, whose book The Next Settlement came out last year. I’ve published a lot of poems in journals, though, so if you saw some of them, thanks for the compliment. My work reading slush at Chicago Review taught me just how many competent, talented but ultimately unexceptional poets there are out there — my private fear (I suspect many poets have it) is that I’m one of them.
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By: Steve Tills

Steve Tills — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 05:33:51 +0000

Michael, I suspect that I’ve boo-booed there:
You wrote:
“3. The historical avant-garde was programatically opposed to the very concept of the “aesthetic,” much less to aesthetic value, & today’s soi-disant avant-gardists are often just as suspicious of the concept. Many of them subscribe (as do I) to something like Bourdieu’s claim that “the aesthetic” is a mystification of cultural capital.”
I meant to be coupling avant-garde poets/poetry with “the aesthetic APPROACH,” not “aesthetic value” (Bloom’s term). Possibly my understanding of this aesthetic approach is NOT what you are referring to as “the ‘aesthetic,’” also, yes? I mean, as I understand it, the avant-garde pomers that I know definitely take an “aesthetic approach”; that is, they want their language (units, including even their punctuation marks) to SING, not necessarily “mean.” They want more to entertain than to instruct. They want to “explore” and “investigate” everything about their “means” and medium. They want opacity, not so much “transparency.” They want investigations into the nature of of things like transparency, itself, whether it’s real or an illusion, etcetera, etcetera.
Hey, shoot, listen, Michael, I’ve read some of your very, very good poetry, and recommend same. I believe we come from the same, errr, “traditions,” but my terminology is made up as I go along, so I have probably confused it with terminology that the Blooms and Bourdieus use in stricter, established senses with which I am only clumsily and occasionally acquainted. Bloom, for example, I strum through his _Western Canon_ some nights in January and February when it’s way too cold here in western New York to drive over to the park where they have those big street lights and I can check my latest “Answer” to my golf swing at 2 a.m. (seriously), but other than that, I just like his erudition and pick up a theme like Shakespeare teaches Freud his theories of personality (or something to that effect I think he, Bloom, argues) and I like some of that stuff, but not all of it sticks.
Again, what I was really trying to get into, or out of my muddle, is that there seems a bit TOO MUCH experimentation with form (so as to establish a True New School) and PeRhAPs not enough attention to Content (because after all it’s Form, one’s aesthetic technique and all and the Energy of one’s words, that gets ya in the Lit History Books), and I myself would like to see EVEN more of stuff that has considerably less ambition and a tad more of the old-fashioned interests in the Insights and Depths that truly move society and humans further along in their evolutionary ascendency (ummm, yeah, that assumes that evolution means we’re always getting “better,” developing our faculties more fully and more completely).
Hey, I’m the original broken record, myself, and Yes, I do need to think things through more, but it’s golf season and the first one in 5 years whence I’ve been able to afford to play regularly again (and at my age, it’s my last Hurrah), plus I’ve been terribly scattered the past couple of years, so I don’t finish a lot of things that I start, AND nyseg turned off our Gas because we got behind on our bills, so we’ve been taking baths from water we heat on the stove (electric) and I myself have been doing cold showers, but I can’t use that as excuse tomorrow, because we paid the bill, finally, and we’ll have heat and hot water again tomorrow evening for the first time in 6 or 8 weeks.
Cheers, Comrade!
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By: SherylLuna

SherylLuna — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 16:39:08 +0000

I should have finished my coffee before posting .There isn’t anything bad in poetry trying to help people live as Wallace Stevens said. My last comment was lame as in “lame duck”.
Mr. Bloom was correct about our anxiety as poets over those poets that come before us and most of us have varying and hopefully continually changing aesthetics. I think what kind of person one is in general matters. Of course there are poets who are not good, as all of us as human beings are flawed and wounded in our behavior and limited perceptions. But yes, the striving to be good and to read inspiring verse at an emotional or even spirtual level still exists. Poetry can be about whatever we want it to be about as individuals.
Some people still read for enjoyment, for a sense of peace and yes, some bit of truth or some understanding of “experience” since we are all individuals with our own truths and our own experiences. Yes, such things may be narrow, but they are ultimately human. Others read for an intellectual thrill. And some walk with an air of superiority and some of us are simply crazy. This polarizing attitude left/right, innovative/ (non-innovative?) is prevelant online. I would some days just like to sit down and have a drink with poets who seem to be on the “other” side. Leftist politics seem to be a blurr, a lure to self-promotion and one-up-manship, but this can also occur on the right. There is nothing wrong with trying to be good though we fail, fail and fail again.
Argumentation takes time and resources. The left is like a human being, fraught with contradictions and complexities. There is no single path. It’s great we are on this path to learning and growing as indiviudals.
Life is in many ways like a batte or a race. It is filled with passion, stupididy, mistakes, arrogance, selfishness, death, birth and so much more than mere one-up-manship.
We are all guity of stupidity and being human. None of us is correct in our estimations of what is what. Most of us are happy to read a poem that delights us in some way.
Yes, someone once told me to remember the pleasure we get from writing and reading. There’s nothing wrong with human beings trying to help oneanother, and the heart is not such a bad thing.
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By: Annie Finch

Annie Finch — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 16:11:29 +0000

Thanks for the links and ideas–all very useful! Thanks Lucia for a good discussion, and thanks Harriet.
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By: Lydia Olidea

Lydia Olidea — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 15:36:30 +0000

Just a few fragmentary thoughts.
Is war really harder to control than love? I don’t say this as a romantic, particularly. But hypothetically at least, the American public could vote only to elect candidates who would cease funding the current war immediately. Unlikely, but practicable, in the technical sense. Whereas love can’t be compelled, right? (Sub-debate: The Iliad is less about war, which is its setting, than it is about fate — the element which can’t be compelled).
Is this ongoing measure of Vietnam poetry a case of “assuming the conclusion,” as the logicians say? It seems like the poems being looked for are poems are a priori poems that resemble Jarrell or “Dulce et Decorum Est” or etc but just happen to be about Vietnam. But maybe by this time and these conditions “war poetry” just looks really different. This seems almost predictable, though it would be hard to predict in advance what it would look like. Two great Vietnam war poems that haven’t been mentioned, I don’t think: “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” and Michael Palmer’s “Sun.” (Sub-debate: what if some of the best “Vietnam war poetry” or “Gulf war poetry” or “War on terror poetry” decided to prosecute its account at the level of form or mode rather than content? Is one allowed to read for that? Or by “war poetry” do we just mean a quite narrow slice of a particular kind of descriptive mode combined with appropriate emotional tenor?)
I have a corollary to Lucia’s initial curiosity. Given that we spend less time in thrall to love or war — by far — than in thrall to economy, “why is there not much good poetry written about” economics, right or left, Democrat or Republican?
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By: Sheryl

Sheryl — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 15:11:39 +0000

Poetry is not always logical.
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By: Michael Robbins

Michael Robbins — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 04:46:36 +0000

Steve, I appreciate your taking the time to respond; but I don’t think you’ve followed your arguments & questions through to their logical conclusions.
1. Maybe Bloom’s being selective, but so what?: he’s not saying that armed victory is all that The Iliad teaches; but that’s one of the things it teaches, right? It doesn’t matter if it also teaches values we would agree with: if Homeric values include the glory of armed combat, then we will agree that it upholds values we would not wish to emulate. Maybe it includes others, too; that’s not the point. The question is whether we should look to literature for moral or political guidance; Bloom argues that if we do, we’re likely to end up valorizing warfare.
2. It’s irrelevant that Bloom is a “moral man” (if he is, which I doubt); he’s already specifically said that he doesn’t read in order to form his values. So if he is a moral man, he didn’t become one because he formed his personal, social, or political values through his reading. The point isn’t what kind of person he is, but what kind of person someone who took moral lessons from literature would be. His whole point is that he doesn’t do that.
3. The historical avant-garde was programatically opposed to the very concept of the “aesthetic,” much less to aesthetic value, & today’s soi-disant avant-gardists are often just as suspicious of the concept. Many of them subscribe (as do I) to something like Bourdieu’s claim that “the aesthetic” is a mystification of cultural capital.
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By: Steve Tills

Steve Tills — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 01:24:40 +0000

Michael Robbins wrote:
I don’t agree with Harold Bloom very often, but he’s absolutely, unarguably correct on this one:
“The Iliad teaches the surpassing glory of armed victory, while Dante rejoices in the eternal torments he visits upon his very personal enemies. Tolstoy’s private version of Christianity throws aside nearly everything that anyone among us retains, and Dostoevsky preaches anti-Semitism, obscurantism, and the necessity of human bondage. Shakespeare’s politics, insofar as we can pin them down, do not appear to be very different from those of his Coriolanus, and Milton’s ideas of free speech and free press do not preclude the imposition of all manner of societal restraints. Spenser rejoices in the massacre of Irish rebels, while the egomania of Wordsworth exalts his own poetic mind over any other source of splendor.
“The West’s greatest writers are subversive of all values, both ours and their own. Scholars who urge us to find the source of our morality and our politics in Plato, or in Isaiah, are out of touch with the social reality in which we live. If we read the Western Canon in order to form our social, political, or personal moral values, I firmly believe we will become monsters of selfishness and exploitation.”
I know I’m a broken record, but: it’s just a liberal fetish that leads us to expect models of virtue from our poets. For most of history, writing poetry was available only to those who instantiated values liberalism finds a priori abhorrent. But liberalism’s a phase.”
————————————-
Isn’t Bloom being just a little bit “selective” there? For example, is the “surpassing glory of armed victory” ALL that the Iliad teaches?
Now, when Bloom writes, “If we read the Western Canon in order to form our social, political, or personal moral values, I firmly believe we will become monsters of selfishness and exploitation,”
doesn’t he leave out himself? He is, himself, for all intents and purposes, a particularly “moral” man by any reasonably rational scheme of things, and he’s one of the 20th century’s most articulate and, to my mind, intelligent literary critics (whether predictably pompous, pedantic, and “old-fashioned” or not). That is, he has studied, if not indeed absorbed much of the entire canon and he’s hardly what anybody would call a sociopath, right?
Okay, yes-sirree, he would have us gain “aesthetic value” from Literature/Poetry, and we should not spend our time reading it to rationalize social, political, economic agendas. Shakespeare, for instance, we should not be “reducing him to the ‘social energies’ of the English Renaissance” (_The Western Canon_, 3), but how does that mean, if we read Shakespeare, we won’t in fact advance our understanding of those social energies, and god knows all kinds of others, much more readily than we will reading religious books authored by a James Dobson or the polemical texts of a Phyllis Schlafly (two folks, perhaps just strawmen and strawwomyn, here)? Or even Bloom’s own eminently authoritative and ingenious criticism, which does in the end, after all, advance his own literary values and thus moralizes without necessarily deepening our understanding of what it means to be moral or live a moral life?
Funny, just like Bloom, most avant-garde (and others, sorry) poets cite “aesthetic value” as the prime value of their poetries and the primary thing that we should seek in reading them, but most of these same poets, like Bloom of his generation, are also among the most moral citizens in our society and in all other cultures. Okay, maybe they were inclined to become exceptionally moral before they began reading and practicing poetry. I’m not sure how to define “virtue” (or Moral) at any given minute, but I myself am inclined expect models of virtue in the poets I know and have known and I expect to express my disappointment in them if/when they ever flagrantly abuse those expectations.
And THAT prudish sounding stance may (perhaps quite rightly) turn off Both Harold Bloom AND a considerable number of poet friends who might (quite rightly) conclude that I just “don’t get it,” that I was at least on the right track back when I was myself quite irreverent and had some small but real ambitions to perhaps bring into the world some new aesthetic value. TODAY, I have far fewer such ambitions, almost zero delusions that I ever could, and a strange new determination to at least pursue something “deeper,” whatever that might be. I’ll say one thing — it’s something more than mere “aesthetic value,” but I have to pursue it anyhow, regardless that Both Bloom and many poets I admire and revere would have no interest in it. I’ll have to take my lumps.
And maybe not pursue much of anything anymore. In that sense, I’m definitely WITH doodle, who pointed out that poets are NOT better than anybody else. And there’s a good deal of truth to that. Which is quite sad, for me. I have always held them in such high esteem, or wanted to, anyway. Shoot, I dunno what I think anymore…
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By: unreliable narrator

unreliable narrator — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 21:02:52 +0000

Poor Ms. Finch! What an assignment…if, however, you wind up enjoying it, perhaps you’d consider tackling another such mission? You certainly have the thoughtfulness, taste, and sense of humor required….
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By: Lucia

Lucia — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 18:25:40 +0000

Soon I’ll sign off, but I will say that so far I’ve read the Wilner essay and some the responses to it–about our government’s sending writers to Iraq to teach writing workshops. It was dismaying to read a letter of support that came from a formalist poet–because thiat feeds the (bogus) notion that formalists coalesce (thank you, Doug) on the right..
I was also interested in the Wilner because of my own conflicted emotions. That is, I agreed with the critics of the program like Wilner and Komunyakaa, but I know that if I’d been asked to go (I can’t go, I couldn’t do that kind of travel) I could not resist the adventure. I’d be dying to go precisely because, in reality, I couldn’t go..Self-interest above principle, though.
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By: Jilly

Jilly — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 16:12:26 +0000

I would think, Annie, that you would approach the poem how you would approach any other poem? I’m not sure why you’d approach that subject in a different way? If your pacifism is putting the breaks on, because of the subject, why not try a persona poem?
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By: Rich Villar

Rich Villar — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 14:03:30 +0000

Hey, Annie. I prefer to trust your particular brand of kung fu and refrain from opening my big mouth. (I do that enough.) I always enjoy reading what you have to say, though. Happy love and war poetry…
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By: Emily Warn

Emily Warn — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 13:56:40 +0000

Also, Philip Metres pulled toegher for us an annotated list of “documentary” poems–”Such poetry arises from the idea that poetry is not a museum-object to be observed from afar, but a dynamic medium that informs and is informed by the history of the moment.”
Annie, You might want to read this essay “When Yellow Ribbons and Flag-Waving Aren’t Enough”: An ex-soldier’s take on recent war poetry.” One of the books we gave him was Kent Johnson’s Lyric Poetry After Auschwitz. Fick read the handful of contemporary poetry books on war on his way to train soldiers in Afghanistan. (But don’t jump to conclusions about what type of training that was. Read the link in his article to another one of his articles in the Washington Post.
Emily
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