After all, this is Harriet, right? This is free expression among poets, right? The ultimate open-minded intellectual discourse around, right? What could there possibly be to, like, dislike here?
Report this comment

Report this comment

And look…even Kent’s bare and simple honesty got negative votes. This field is definitely not level.
Report this comment

My opinions aside about any commentators here who would seem to be “popular” or “unpopular”…

It does seem, as candidly reported by four or five people now, that the Dislike/Like buttons are available for manipulation by whomever, for whatever reasons– ready, under single posts, to be hit multiple times by single individuals. And one does wonder if this is happening.

If it is the case that a reader can vote for a post multiple times, then it’s obvious (isn’t it?) that the system is available for abuse.

I’ve never myself used the function because I think it’s shallow and risks cheapening the atmosphere of discussion. An individual limit of two or three posts per day would be a much more elegant and less “punitive” option for controlling the problem that’s developed over the past number of months.

Regardless, the issue of the voting-function’s apparent abuse should be addressed.

Kent
Report this comment

– Terreson

.
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

And what rough beast, its hour come round at laSt,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

– William Butler Yeats

.
Report this comment

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4VlcVfgFJk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DqEbV29uGzA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfvS_fgbuDI
Report this comment

Terreson
Report this comment

It saddens me your blog starter hasn’t generated more traffic. To me Sexton has become a litmus test. Those who read her and find their eyes dilating pass the test. Those who read her with eyes glassing over fail. It is that simple.

You ask if she is a major poet. But, of course, the question gets subject to how each of us determines and defines a major poet, right? My estimation of a major poet involves someone who speaks to my whole body: my intellect, my emotions, my psyche, my senses, my groin, my feet, my arms, in brief, my soma. I would submit that Anne Sexton is a major poet because she speaks to every part of my body and in concert. Some poets speak, and speak well, to certain parts of us. Few poets speak to the whole of what it means to be a human. Sexton speaks to the whole of what it means to be a human.

If I could resurrect that long ago critic, Rosenthal, who attached the label of Confessional to Lowell and company I think I would bring him back from the dead just in order to punch him. The pejorative of his label has done so much harm to American poetry. It has, in fact, stunted the organic growth of American poetry by making poets way too self-doubting. Poetry is confession. Poetry is revelation. Poetry is witness. Poetry, in the final analysis, is duende.

You know something else just occurred to me. Sexton, through her poetry, might have been the first to get an audience and to say women are human type people too, and people following their own rules of procedure.

Prosodically speaking, if you are still wondering if Sexton is a major poet, I still think she is. She took from Rimbaud. She took from him and she excellenced his notions.

Terreson
Report this comment

And besides, I’m no threat to you…I’m just a simple philosophical Nature poet and I never even write about alien space bugs!
Report this comment

Sexton is a major poet.

Terreson
Report this comment

“Also, if posting a link to your review in a comment on a post that discusses a review that quotes you is “shameless,” what is posting your own poetry in comment streams? Just wondering.”

Kidding, Michael…just kidding. But I do think it’s getting a little boring around here without a poem now and then, don’t you?

On that subject, here’s something I just posted on another blog that may explain my occasionally apparently irrational behavior:

“In fact, I intend to abandon my entire ‘voice in the woods’ self-publishing independent poet crusade altogether.

I have learned that the ‘anti-Po-biz’ people are complete hypocrites. They not only don’t buy (and therefore promote) those of us who intentionally self-published in order to at least try to create some general popularity outside of the ‘business’, but they also fawn on the ‘canonical’ and established poets as much, or even more, than the others. Rather than make a nobody outsider SOMEBODY, they just whine and pout and then turn around and buy an established somebody’s book anyway.

I started my independence “crusade” as a devoted bibliophile, opposed even to the internet. I soon saw the error of my ways, though, and started using the web. I was inspired by a comment I read (can’t remember where) that average people thought that a poem should be like a prayer…something you get for free. Free poetry! You can’t make a living on it anyway, I thought, so why not? I received almost exclusively positive comments about my poems. People like them, but they won’t buy the books BECAUSE it isn’t Po-biz. No prizes, awards or pub credits = worthless scum, good poetry or not. I had fun, anyway…what I described on Harriet as “a fine madness.” And I learned a lot. For example, I think I will now submit some poems to the New Yorker.”

And, since it’s the full moon (and I’m sober, BTW) here’s a damned poem!

Don’t You See?

Doesn’t anyone see around us
this unnatural lethargy,
a nation almost hypnotized
into digital complacency,
the loss of all community?
You look out for you. I’ll look out for me.
It’s as though we all agreed at once
to look away.

Don’t you sense a certain general slow
decrease in energy, some strange kind of
supernatural invisibility?
And so the greedy and ambitious men,
disengaged from this reality,
after twenty-thousand years still
rule the Earth. Still make a mess.

But if no challenge then no consequence,
no task to overcome, reason to proceed.
Then no victory or success.
Does no one see this debilitating need?
This desire to run away and hide?

Being handed what you want is not a challenge,
or finding it or stealing or having lied.
Knowing you can’t have it but honestly
obtaining, that is winning a hero’s rest.
So how should we obtain, then,
rise up to take this challenge?
How do those without greed or blind ambition
learn to care for what the greedy need,
this evil then to best?
How do those without need for dominance
learn to fight and inflict violence?

.
Copyright 2009 – Tall Grass & High Waves, Gary B. Fitzgerald
Report this comment

Superciliously,
PBS
Report this comment

I wish more of my review for the London Review of Books were online, but here’s the link for the opening: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n15/robb04_.html (subscribers can read the whole thing).
Report this comment

Actually, You Tube has a few clips of Sexton reading her poetry. Viewing them reminded me again what can get lost when the audio record of the poet reading her poems gets lost.

Unsung
a poet’s job is
half-done.

In print
lovers are left to
trace lips.

Terreson
Report this comment

Lowell, I couldn’t find either, the Berryman clips I found were a bit embarrassing…
Report this comment