Comments on: “I Pledge My Death Wattle to the Cause of Poetry”

By: LH

LH — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 23:33:42 +0000

very funny.

By: thomas brady

thomas brady — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 20:03:48 +0000

“Walt Whitman was not a Great poet. He had an ear for musical, moving rhetoric that could have easily taken speech or essay form. He pandered to public opinion.
Pablo Neruda was not a Great poet. He lacked discipline as an editor and reviser. He wrote political poetry that bordered on propaganda, and had a weakness for lovelorn sentiment.
Emily Dickinson was not a Great poet. She absconded on her responsibility to address the issues of her age. Her work does not show any significant stylistic evolutions: those dashes mark the canter of a one-trick pony.
Now, prove me wrong.”
THIS IS GREAT!!!
Aw, rats.
Amy King was only kidding.
So Mark Strand says he was influenced by Wallace Stevens, and if a graduate student poet comes along in 25 years and says Mark Stand was his key to Wallace Stevens, Mark Strand will be ‘caught in the web of greatness?’ (nice phrase!) Nah…I’m not buying it.
I don’t know if I can define ‘the great,’ but here’s how I would define the ‘not great.’
Easily impressed.

By: Travis Nichols

Travis Nichols — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 16:34:54 +0000

Thanks, Sandra. Amy's response came just a little too late for my roundup, but here's a link to it for latecomers: http://amyking.wordpress.com/2009/02/26/on-greatness-them-that-do-it/

By: Sandra Beasley

Sandra Beasley — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 14:08:31 +0000

Thanks to an invitation from Amy King, I’m joining the fray on this one. My response essay is too long to copy into a commenting cell, but here’s a snippet:
“So what’s the problem again? Orr dredges up Donald Hall’s essay on “Poetry and Ambition,” suggesting epic drive is lacking in today’s poets. I just don’t believe that. A.E. Stallings is translating Lucretius. Thomas Sayers Ellis is not only writing provocative poems, he’s articulating a poetics of sound. Kenneth Goldsmith is probably tucked away in his conceptual mad scientist’s lab right now, giggling as he pours a test tube of adverbs into a beaker of train times.
Love or hate the contest system, I think it has caused more poets to think in terms of big, book-length “projects” than ever before. Some of the results are startling, whether they end up winning the National Poetry Series (Tyehimba Jess’s leadbelly) or come into the world via an Espresso Book Machine (Michael Schiavo’s Mad Song). Read Matthea Harvey’s Modern Life or Patricia Smith’s Blood Dazzler before you tell me today’s poets lack ambition….”
The rest is up at “Chicks Dig Poetry,” http://www.sbeasley.blogspot.com .
Thanks for hosting this discussion–it’s exactly the kind of thing Harriet should be hosting.
Cheers, Sandra

By: thomas brady

thomas brady — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 01:40:53 +0000

Henry,
Oh yes, yes, of course Mutlu can join our little club!
Thomas

By: Henry Gould

Henry Gould — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 18:47:26 +0000

If it is our secret, Thomas – which I sincerely doubt – Mutlu Konuk Blasing was in on it 20 yrs ago. See her American Poetry : the Rhetoric of its Forms (Yale YUP, 1989).

By: thomas brady

thomas brady — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 16:36:19 +0000

Henry,
You are absolutely right about Eliot and Poe. I’ve gone through their critical works with a fine tooth comb and Eliot definitely picked Poe’s pocket. Commentary on either side doesn’t mention this, however. It will be our little secret.
Edgar’s under-the-radar influence on Tom surely broke Uncle Waldo and Granpa Eliot’s New England heart, but when you read “From Poe to Valery,” to increase your pleasure, I advise you read the work while listening to Hitchcock’s ‘Psycho’ soundtrack: Eliot is Anthony Hopkins and Poe, Janet Leigh. Tom’s blood-lust is ferocious, as if bloody revenge is all that will cure him; as Eliot attempts to hide the body under the floorboards, you may have to put the book down.
Those who convert to a new sect with great fanfare are rarely sincere. If you don’t think Eliot was a puritan, read his opinions of Shelley. How convenient for Eliot that his Church was situated in England. “Four Quartets” is overrated, in my opinion, and it’s named for places in England and New England. After Eliot won fame with ‘The Waste Land’ he went a little soft–at least until the war cry that was ‘From Poe to Valery.’
For all of Eliot’s talk of ‘Tradition,’ he rejected great swaths of literary history: “Hamlet,” Milton, and the Romantics, just to name three pieces.
As I said in my previous post, Eliot’s experience in France was slumming. Eliot came face-to-face with Poe as he explored French literature and…well, read, “From Poe to Valery.” Tom did not finally betray Uncle Waldo, for Emerson encouraged subversion.
As for ‘the great’ in American Literature, these two are at the top of the heap, and their relationship is an underground and fascinating one: T.S. Eliot and Edgar A. Poe.
Thomas

By: thomas brady

thomas brady — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 15:43:43 +0000

Manny,
I agree. I hate embroglios, never mind those of the pseudo-intellectual blogetry kind. God forbid. I wasn’t raised that way, certainly.
Sorry for the lecture. I didn’t quite make my point. Ya win some, ya lose some.
Hey, I’ll trade ya my W.H Auden bubble gum card for three John Ashberys and a Jorie Graham!
Thomas

By: Henry Gould

Henry Gould — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 01:30:28 +0000

Thomas,
that’s all very interesting – but I think you’re exaggerating for effect (a very Poe-ish kind of provocation).
Eliot was highly influenced by both Poe & the French poets – & not just in his early career. He admired Valery all the way through. & what is “Four Quartets” if not a poem aspiring (a la Symbolism) to the condfition of music?
There is NO MAJOR FIGURE in 20th-century poetry in English who sounds more like Poe than Eliot. Stevens has some of that jingle-music, but not the spookiness (even when Stevens is trying to be spooky, it just sounds FUNNY to me, most of the time. Hoobla-hoobla-how. His spookiness – Stevens’s – is not so funny in the late poems – but then he doesn’t sound much like Poe anymore…).
& to try to distance E. from Poe on the basis of some sort of Anglo-mafioso attachment seems a long stretch. What is Eliot’s whole career but a rejection of Emersonian-American-Romantic “exceptionalism”, on behalf of Anglo-CATHOLIC tradition? (Closer, again, to Poe’s sense of fate than Emerson’s.)
But you’ve certainly put Poe back in my range of curious lore… want to read more of his criticism, & the Eliot essay you mention (which I must have read a long time ago…).

By: Manoel Cartola

Manoel Cartola — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 22:42:44 +0000

Thomas
I appreciate the sermon, but you are preaching to the… well, you know.
The gist of what I meant to say is not that readers focusing on the poet. It is true that, as I’ve learned, some poets (often the ones who are most difficult) you have to “get to know” before you can understand their poetry and appreciate it. That being said, if one is writing a poem thinking only of what will make them famous then more power to them (or less), but personally I’ve always enjoyed the act/process of writing for what it is in itself. Pumpkinification is a word that comes to mind.
And I can speak at length against what you are arguing but I really don’t want to get in the embroglio of back-and-forth, pseudo-intellectual blogetry. However, most poets, after reading their biographies, are poets/people whom I’ve grown to dislike quite a bit. I really dislike Eliot as a person (admittedly I didn’t know him too well). Furthermore, the late-mid-century confessional from New England, to my sensibility, usually have an air of entitlement that seeps into their verses, even if their verses are great. Also, I diametrically oppose Auden’s aesthetical stances regarding poetry but I still love his poems independent of Auden and recite them from memory. Then there are poets who I think I’d like as people/poets but whose poems I do not enjoy (most of the Beats might fit into this category) and Gary Snyder is a first-rate candidate for the phenomena of liking a poet but not the poems (for me).
I am digressing, I know that it is the human element that gives readers something to cling to (or fixate upon, whatever your conception of this phenomenon is), But I think you saw in my humble little comment something that really wasn’t there and missed the general message and interpretd in terms of readership rather than writer-ship. Heck, anonymous is my favorite writer of all time.
-manny