Whoever has the cane is right.

Thomas
Report this comment

“Prepositions have always been & continue to be perfectly fine to end sentences with.”

Ack!

“To schoolmarmishly refuse to split infinitives is to reveal a fundamental ignorance of the history of English usage.”

Ugh! (I’m making ‘history’ with my ‘usage!’)

“Don’t tell Shakespeare, T. S. Eliot, President Obama, or I about how important case is.”

Wha…?

What say you, gentlemen?

How should we punish Robbins?

How many strokes with the cane?

Thomas
Report this comment

Too correct is good.
Report this comment

The fact that some linguist, or even some whole school of linguistics, has come along and said that a word now means this or that, well that cuts no ice with me. The examples you give—splitting an infinitive, ending with a preposition—I’ve lived with those anomalies for years, as a student, as a teacher and as a writer, and each time I have encountered them I just do what any native speaker does, talk my best. “So what,” I say, even to my students. “Say what you mean.”

Hypercorrect is a new concept for me, not one that I’m probably going to need except to talk to you. So I’m going to use it as you presented it—too correct, anachronistic, atavistic even, in a hypercritical sense. Patriarchal maybe.

I like that. I’m not going to worry whether I’m right or not.

Christopher
Report this comment

From the OED, which I suggest we let have the last word: “Of a spelling, pronunciation, or construction: falsely modelled on an apparently analogous prestigeful form. Also of a speaker using such a form.”
Report this comment

Re. The word “hypercorrect” applied to any activity means too correct. That’s a different concept altogether from incorrect.
Report this comment

Of course I have never read Zen & the Art of Archery & am unlikely to do so in this lifetime, so I fear I cannot reread it.
Report this comment

Report this comment

Thomas…you’re a class act, dude. Your list was very clever.

Now, let’s get off this ‘Modernist’ shit, shall we, and focus on TODAY…on NOW, on OUR time of poetry?
Report this comment

Sort of like sex.

Same thing in the training of violinists, acrobats and ballet dancers. The great ones a.) get a lot of hypercorrect discipline at the early stages, b.) put aside everything they have been taught when it matters!

What might be interesting for a pedant like you, because the point you have just made is pedantic, that such rules are “fallacies” instead of just part of the educational process, is to look over the various styles employed by the writers on this blog, It’s a high standard here, yes, but there are lapses because we are all in a rush and also usually more concerned with what we say than how we say it. On the other hand, there are individuals whose style does let them down, and their arguments are weakened by their lack of poise and verbal authority. You might look and see exactly what they do.

You might also want to reread Zen in the Art of Archery.
Report this comment

1. Prepositions have always been & continue to be perfectly fine to end sentences with.

2. To schoolmarmishly refuse to split infinitives is to reveal a fundamental ignorance of the history of English usage.

3. Don’t tell Shakespeare, T. S. Eliot, President Obama, or I about how important case is.
Report this comment

Important guidelines for writers:

1.Don’t abbrev.

2.Check to see if you any words out.

3.Be carefully to use adjectives and adverbs correct.

4.About sentence fragments.

5.When dangling, don’t use participles.

6.Don’t use no double negatives.

7.Each pronoun agrees with their antecedent.

8.Just between you and I, case is important.

9.Join clauses good, like a conjunction should.

10.Don’t use commas, that aren’t, necessary.

11.Its important to use apostrophe’s right.

12.It’s better not to unnecessarily split an infinitive.

13.Never leave a transitive verb just lay there without an object.

14.Only Proper Nouns should be Capitalized. also a sentence should begin with a capital and end with a period

15.Use hyphens in compound-words, not just in any two-word phrase.

16.In letters compositions reports and things like that we use commas

to keep a string of items apart.

17.Watch out for irregular verbs which have creeped into our language.

18.Verbs has to agree with their subjects.

19.Avoid redundant and unnecessary redundancy.

20.A writer mustn’t shift your point of view.

21.Don’t write a run-on sentence you’ve got to punctuate it.

22.A preposition isn’t a good thing to end a sentence with.

23.Avoid cliches like the plague.
Report this comment

Here’s a question or two for someone whose issue seems to be that there’s a failure to teach poetic technique, prosody, etc.

How much blame do you assign to Modernism for the collapse of technical knowledge? How would you characterize the cause of this collapse? Did it just happen from laziness? Did free verse win key debates, or did entropy set in? If you could briefly cite some historical documents of important arguments that turned the tide in favor of free verse (or influential poets or poems) what would they be?

Thomas
Report this comment

Until we can regain the public’s interest, English majors will serve as a large part of our audience. Hell, I wish there were millions more of them. I don’t have a problem with citing publication as a goal, even in a time when everyone with a DTP or website development program is an “editor”. Sure, it’s a standard lower than a wheel rut in a sinkhole, but perhaps poetry readers have always harbored the notion that they were fledgling poets. The more people we have touting poetry in general, the better. I wish the graduates every success in their careers, doing whatever jobs are available to poets who think AnaDiplosis is a Greek porn star. Maybe some of these grads or their offspring will find innovative ways to blaze a trail to the public, if only as a background buzz.

-o-
Report this comment

You are right. I have no self-interest, at least as viewed from the outside. My interest is purely pedgogical. I am selfless. Strange, though, how I enjoy this…

Thomas
Report this comment

Robbins says there never were any ‘good old days.’ He is the witty pragmatist.

At the other end of the spectrum stands Tere, for whom the ‘good old days’ corresponds to some hazy, Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, cottage industry, world in which honest folks work with their hands at their rustic workbenches. Tere is the ‘small-is-beautiful’ romantic.

The problem with the views of Robbins and Tere on this question is the tendency to get lost in generalization. I could agree with each of them, by turns, on various questions, but finally we would be speaking a different language, not because of differences in aesthetics, so much, as from differences concerning simple historical facts and their effects on the larger issues.

We could blather all day from self-interest, or we could read the specific documents, such as “Understanding Poetry” (Penn Warren & Brooks) or the essays of the Fugitives, Modernists, and New Critics, which apply to the real, specific, and unique historical situation.

The New Critics were careful to cover their tracks: read the poem! Pay no attention to the historical documents behind the Red Curtain! I am the Great and Powerful…New…Critic!

Robbins is a product of the New Critical Creative Writing factory. He is immersed in poetry and brags about how he teaches and studies poetry all day. The consequence of this is that Robbins cannot turn around and observe the masters who made him. Because the New Critical revolution is now historical fact, it is beyond Robbins’ purview. He is Ransom’s robot. He will never again be a real boy.

Tere blames the world for poetry’s ills; he cannot bring himself to study annoying historical facts, facts that have no romantic sheen attached to them. Tere is not quite the New Critical robot that is Robbins, because Tere is not IN the industry itself, as Robbins is, so Tere is naturally a little suspicious of Robbins’ solipsistic self-interest, which regards the pedagogical nitrous oxide of Gertrude Stein/Henry James/John Ashbery as the only invention we will ever need. Tere is troubled by Lotus Eater, Inc. He wants to escape the island, but he’s not sure how it can be done.
Report this comment

Unless of course you get tenure.
Report this comment

Myself I think you get to the very heart of the matter at the end of your previous post: the poetry industry exists in America, you say, “to create a survival mode for those who only know poetry as a way to survive in economic terms.”

Yes indeed, and if only we could just rewrite that we’d be O.K: “to create a survival mode for those who only know poetry as a way to survive!”

I mean that, too, and I’m just like that myself. Indeed, I suspect most of us on this site are as well. Certainly you are, Margo Berdeshevsky, and Thomas too, and Terreson (I’ve just read his post ahead). Michael Robbins I’m not so sure about because his MFA was free!

What really bugs me is all the deep linguistic, aesthetic, critical and philosophical verbiage that accompanies what has become an entirely artificial display, like you see in the windows of the bakeries in Paris where the most delicious tarts and breads and pastries are recreated in carefully painted plaster to draw you in. And it does too—makes your mouth water, particularly when the shop is closed!

In the Creative Writing Program country that’s America, when you go into the shop you are sold the same indigestible fake delights that are laid out in the window, and go away not only hungry but missing an arm and a leg!

Just like you buy the emperor’s new clothes. Precisely like that. The emperor stays naked because anyone unable to see his delights hasn’t purchased his glasses at an MFA!

Christopher
Report this comment

If you’re right, Michael, then all my calculations are invalid, as I always assumed that the salaries of all those creative writing teachers were paid for by the next generation of, yes, creative writing teachers. If the next generation are all on bursaries and scholarships, wherever does the buck stop?

Tax dollars? Now there’s a scandal!

And what percentage of your annual costs were met by your “Fellowship,” Michael? I mean, did you have a free vacation for two years including that whole library of freshly printed books, the shelves you put them in, your kitchen and your table?

If so, no wonder everybody with a pencil wants a piece of that cake!

Christopher
Report this comment

That’s why he never got a Chair. The Cambridge establishment couldn’t bear his manners, or the fact that he was never going to look right or fit in. By the time I met him he was a tramp that lived in Cambridge, but for every lucky student the stones flew when he rode by on his bicycle.

It’s just as inconceivable that he could have done what Jorie Graham did as become the Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard. And that’s what’s wrong with the American poetry scene, that the most influential poets sit in chairs and tell you that they’re good and deep.

He didn’t, which is why he was.

Finally, you should understand this better than most, dear friend. You make the most outrageous pronouncements in the most uncompromising tone, yet aren’t attached to anything you say. What you believe in is rigor and honesty, and expect anyone in dialogue with you to sit up and take notice of that, not you. It’s not because your ideas establish you as more important than someone else, or get you the job, or even influence, just that such ideas are life.

Which is what poetry should do to, of course, not impress, not support you!

Christopher
Report this comment