A brand-new suite of poems by Geoffrey Hill (“Seven Hymns to our Lady of Chartres”) opens with, you guessed it, an epigraph from Weil. Go here:

http://www.unicaen.fr/mrsh/lisa/publicationsGb.php?p=1&id=0243&num=024
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I don’t care for Pollock, either.

Gary, I can’t find that conversation on Silliman. I can’t make heads nor tails of that site…

Thomas
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Here is a recent exchange I had on Silliman’s blog:

Gary B. Fitzgerald said…

Seth Abramson said:

“Amongst the younger set, the so-called SoQ has few if any highly-vocal defenders because it’s a vastly-outmanned minority position in the contemporary American poetry community.”

And:

“It would be fair to say, I suppose, that generally–more so than so-called post-avantism–third-way poetics is ascendant amongst the younger set.”

Seth, I recommend that you click on the link up on Ron’s 4/23 post called “Why students don’t like poetry”. It links to ‘The Chronicle Review’. Most of the posters are teachers and professors bemoaning the fact that their “younger set” students can’t understand and, therefore, do not relate to contemporary poetry. They need to use rhyming and metrical poems to even engage them. I think you’ll find it quite interesting. I saw that K. Silem Mohammed weighed in also.

Apparently, the “younger set” are not fans of the “younger set” poetry.

Brian said…

Apparently, the “younger set” are not fans of the “younger set” poetry.You’re comparing apples to some fruit from a planet on Omicron Persei 8 here. The younger set mentioned in that Chronicle piece is made up of your average undergraduate student (read: not a creative writing student or even an English major) for whom Cummings’s “since feeling is first” is the height of experimental verse. The “younger set” Seth is talking about is made up of younger poets who are far more experienced in reading those poets mentioned in the Chronicle piece, Merwin and Ashbery primarily. You can’t draw conclusions about the latter based on anecdata about the former.

Curtis Faville said…

Gary:

So this is a surprise?

How does dumbing down poetry by teaching it as if it were a mathematical quiz game enliven or raise the bar for its appreciation?

The deepest experiences adolescents are likely to have is with the power of assertion.

When I was 15, I was most impressed by the WWI elegies of Owen, the mock-sad ironies of Prufrock, etc.

Wouldn’t young girls get more from reading Plath’s Ariel, than counting syllables in a Moore poem?

Teaching poetry as an exercise in prosody is like using grammar (diagramming sentences) to teach literature. Henry James wrote some beautiful sentences, but diagramming them wouldn’t be likely to draw you to his work.

Gary B. Fitzgerald said…

Brian, you have confirmed my very point. You said:

“The younger set mentioned in that Chronicle piece is made up of your average undergraduate student (read: not a creative writing student or even an English major) for whom Cummings’s “since feeling is first” is the height of experimental verse.”

Curtis, you have confirmed my very point. You said:

“How does dumbing down poetry by teaching it as if it were a mathematical quiz game enliven or raise the bar for its appreciation?”

My point was (if you’ve been following the debate these last few months) that poetry has evolved so far beyond the average reader that it shouldn’t even be considered ‘poetry’ at all any more. Now, it has become just another esoteric science understandable only by the initiated elite, like Quantum Membrane Theory or Genetic Biochemistry. Of what value, then, is poetry if it’s completely inaccessible without knowing the ‘secret handshake’? I thought the whole purpose of poetry was to communicate to and enlighten those (most) people who aren’t poets.

Poetry has not died because of the audience we so cynically blame. Poetry was murdered by the poets themselves.

“Oh no, it wasn’t the airplanes. It was beauty killed the beast.”
-King Kong – 1933

Curtis Faville said…

Gary:

People said the same thing about Eliot and Pound in the 1920′s. It was a joke.

Poetry isn’t “too difficult”.

Poetry taught in the schools continues a tradition begun in childhood, when we read jingle-jangle rhyme poems and narratives to the tots, indoctrinating them with cliches and notions of verse as tinker and bric-a-brac. Then that continues in adulthood, and readers look at writing which doesn’t twinkle and chime as mysterious.

Why do people read romances and mysteries and animal stories and joke books? Naughty!

Poets are the naughtiest of all. Don’t they know poetry should be straightforward and simple and accessible, sweet and easy as a candy-bar?

Poetry makes nothing happen. Let’s dispense with it. Better yet, let’s all sing ballads. That’s easily done.

Poets who don’t toe the line. Poets who insist on arguing about that–banish them. Let’s get back to roots. Rollicking good stuff. Nursery rhymes.

Lowest common denominator. That’s the ticket. Eddie Guest. Robert W. Service. Poems even a moron could appreciate.

Now we’re getting somewhere.

Gary B. Fitzgerald said…

Curtis…if I didn’t know better I’d think that you were secretly following that notorious ‘SoQ’ site Harriet. In fact, as we speak, there is a raging debate going on about whether Robert Service, excluded from the canon, is a ‘children’s’ poet or not.

There is also a fellow named Thomas Brady there who contends that Pound, Eliot and the ‘New Critics’ actually destroyed the public interest in poetry.

So, you’re a ‘post-avant’ spy, aren’t you?

Well, I don’t know, but you have certainly verified my point yet again. You said:

“Lowest common denominator. That’s the ticket. Eddie Guest. Robert W. Service. Poems even a moron could appreciate.”

You are no more than an elitist snob. Do you know how to determine if a man is a fool or not? He’s usually the one who calls other people fools. Do you know how to tell if a man is a poet or not? A genuine poet writes for the “morons”.

Who, then, in fact, is the moron?

We’ll be able to settle this dispute in about, oh, fifty, sixty years or so.

Steven Fama said…

Oh my Gary B. Fitzgerald.

Your whole thing about poetry evolving to a point where you can’t call it poetry anymore, the poets have destroyed, etc . . .

sounds a heck of a lot like what some said about Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz, or The Art Ensemble of Chicago’s more way-out numbers, or the excursions of the Sun Ra Arkestra, or Albert Ayler’s screeching beauties, or Braxton’s playing, etc. etc.

Moldy fig!

Gary B. Fitzgerald said…

“sounds a heck of a lot like what some said about Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz, or The Art Ensemble of Chicago’s more way-out numbers, or the excursions of the Sun Ra Arkestra, or Albert Ayler’s screeching beauties, or Braxton’s playing, etc. etc.”

Steven…what the hell are you talking about?

Isn’t that my whole point? That nobody has even heard of these people…or of the poets you and Curtis so admire?

You do remember the other six billion of us out here, don’t you?
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Does this demand a ‘thank you’ or another ‘fuck you’?

Whatever. Fuck you and thanks, kid.
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BTW, do you remember my poem from many, many moons ago called:

‘Jackson Pollock was a Cubist’?
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J.M.W. Turner was born in 1775.

Thomas
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“and a better painter”
Mike Snider

Comparing Benton to Pollack is like comparing the Wright brothers to Chuck Yeager.

“Benton taught at the Art Students League of New York from 1926 to 1935 and at the Kansas City Art Institute from 1935 to 1941. His most famous student, Jackson Pollock, whom he mentored in the Art Students League, would go on to found the Abstract Expressionist movement—wildly different from Benton’s own style. Jackson Pollock often said that Benton’s traditional teachings gave him something to rebel against. However, art scholars…have recognized that Pollock’s organizational principles continued to follow Benton’s teachings even after his move away from realism, with forms composed around a central vertical pole with each form counterbalanced by an equal and opposite form.”

- Wikipedia
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Yea, the populist Marxist 30s ran headlong into WW II which turned the U.S. into a capitalist giant. The easily manufactured, like Thomas Hart Benton illustrations, books of poetry, recordings of songs, lost a certain ‘Fine Arts’ character. Pete Seeger couldn’t compete with Elvis. Or, even if he could, Seeger and Presley became the same thing: popular music and not ‘fine arts’ music.

Communism as ‘cool’ collapsed and elitism as ‘cool’ replaced it.

Democracy and Fine Arts refused to fit.

Meanwhile the Guggenheims built museums to hold the “fine art” which was deemed “fine art” precisely because the public couldn’t understand it. Critics got “fine art” credentials if they ‘explained’ this ‘art’ to the public and thus ‘expertise’ shifted over to the non-popular and ‘fine art,’ ‘expertise’ and ‘obscurity’ became the same.

Poetry was following painting in this regard; the market/capitalist distribution aspect was different, but the ideology was the same.

Thomas
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(Only in painting did the elitists get rich.)
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I confess I barely knew of Leonie Adams until I found her recently in one of my mid-20th century poetry anthologies (I love collecting poetry anthologies, for the poetry, the forgotten names, the introductions).

Your assessment of Adams is spot on. What an interesting poet!

Perhaps that strong iambic pulse which I detect in her work made her less popular, and occasionaly a puzzling word or phrase, but I find her infinitely charming!

And a bonus! you mention a “scathing essay” against the wonderful Millay by John Crowe Ransom–a central and complex figure in Modern Poetry I’ve been studying on my own.

I just found this on the web:

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2220/is_n2_v37/ai_17249754/

Here’s the beginning of the essay (1995) by John Timberman Newcomb:

“For most of this century Edna St. Vincent Millay was among the most widely-known and read of all American literary figures. Yet at the peak of her popular reputation there began an intensive effort in certain critical circles to marginalize Millay’s poetry, which by the time of her death in 1950 had succeeded in destroying much of her critical reputation. The widening disjunction between popular and critical evaluations of Millay mirrored a broader evaluative shift in the critical canons of modernist poetry during the mid-century period: away from communicative immediacy and social commentary, towards such qualifies as complexity, originality, and impersonality, and best exemplified by such poets as Eliot, Pound, and Yeats. Devastated by this canonical shift were the critical reputations of two groups of well-known writers: on the one hand, explicitly populist poets such as Vachel Lindsay, Carl Sandburg, Archibald MacLeish, and Stephen Vincent Benet; and on the other, female lyricists such as Amy Lowell, Sara Teasdale, Elinor Wylie, Grace Hazard Conkling, and numerous others. Millay is one of the few poets in both of these categories. In recent years feminist historians and critics of modernism have begun to reclaim Millay as a central figure in establishing and expanding the place of the female voice in American poetry; I hope to add a dimension to their portrayal of Millay by arguing that it was her forceful coupling of a poetics of progressive political dissidence with her longstanding feminism that made her especially threatening to the reactionary forces of mid-century criticism, whose efforts will remain in force until we can include in the critical reevaluation of Millay a serious, sympathetic consideration of her explicitly political poetry.”

Thomas
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I love that these people are coming up on this thread.
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I’d like to know more about Sarah Hale.

Poe knew her son at West Point.

Hale published Poe’s “Purloined Letter” in her magazine. Smart lady.

The author of “Casey at the Bat” had a nephew who published “The Waste Land” in his magazine (Emerson & Fuller’s old “Dial”).

So there ya go.

Yea, Poe was in some way involved with every female author in America. The Elizabeth Ellet/Fanny Osgood/Margaret Fuller affair was as fascinating and bizarre a story in American Letters as we’re likely to see.

Thomas
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Havard….etc….Boy that’s along time to hold a grudge. Even I don’t hold them that long.
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