It works this way. Most clicks on ‘click to show comment’ wins. This is TRUE notoriety. All the rest is mere chumminess.

Thomas

Consistency is certainly worthy in an argument–but here Emerson disagreed with Poe and said ‘consistency was a humbug.’ Is that what you mean?

You did not address the point of my post, which was consistency, a regularity of quality over time in an oeuvre. That is what makes greatness, not wondrous one song.

this country is in a bad way, and people with more and more education seem to know less and be less capable of educating themselves. i think MFAs just add to the resentful feelgood institutional dregs. these mis-educated become the teachers (you said you’ve taught, right, and edited?)

if it seems to you like a shaman scared of hypodermic needles, maybe it’s because in your arrogance you can’t see that i’m actually a qualified country doctor who wonders if my patients need orange flavoring in their IV drip.

Thy own prophet says, ‘the first one now will later be last.”

Woe unto thee if thou wouldst not dare to dispute Thomas Brady.

Do you allow George Martin on stage with your “Beatles?”

Anyone could name thousands of obscure artists more profound than your obvious peaks.

Is it the spark of individual genius you seek? Upon what hearth do you seek it?

Would you pit Edgar Poe in all his genius against Walt Whitman? Whitman’s skin would, before you could say ‘Eureka,’ flutter in the wind.

Do you think the chorus of life is sung by Bob Dylan? It is sung by everyone.

Oh, and by the way. Our planet is oval, and early this morning, as the sun burned off the mists in the forest where I walked, I looked up, and saw the sky was more white than blue.

Thomas

and, if you’re going to be advising young poets as a consultant, and expecting those reasonable billable hours…

everybody wants a piece of the pie, self-education is almost dead in our education system, and yet i don’t ask a consultant to find the right library for me.

though, seeing as how don and i started out, maybe i should at least be tipping my librarian.

If you’re asking, as I believe you are, why I didn’t learn certain things on my own–isolated from any guidance–and instead had to discover them in/through an educational environment, I’d say, I don’t know, I’m human?

Take care,
S.

I believe that the Earth is round and the sky is blue on a sunny day. What do you think of that!?

But I’m sure you’ll find a way to disagree.

Walt Whitman, William Blake, Edgar Allan Poe, E.E. Cummings, Robert Frost and Yeats.

Everest, McKinley, The Matterhorn, Kilimanjaro, Mauna kea, K2.

Every range of mountains has its peaks.”

Gary,

Ah, the Thomas Carlyle ‘Great Men’ theory that Poe used to mock. To blindly worship excellence is never a good pedagogical strategy. Yes, respect true greatness wherever its found, but blind hero-worship is quite something else.

Bob Dylan loved to tell stories but he’s no Debussy; some people love the early Beatles but find the Sgt. Peppers era pretentious and some would add the early Beatles just ripped off other sounds, and that fortuitous ‘image’ aspects contributed more to the Beatles’ success than real poetry. Some find Whitman bombastic, Poe-haters are legion, Frost and Yeats hit a few homeruns, but much of their work is didactic or even doggerel, and one could go on and on.

There’s other considerations, too. We can heap together what we love, hoard it, and play it for ourselves over and over again, and then we find the magic we used to love fading. Aesthetic pleasure, as with any kind of pleasure, is a fragile and elusive thing; in some ways criticism is more lasting, and more true. I know this is a difficult concept to grasp, for criticism–to many–is the villain, while the lovely poem or song is the beautiful planet we should protect; but I don’t mean the specific criticism is necessarily true, or that we should cynically spurn the beautiful poem, what I mean is that the ability to judge truthfully is what is finally the most valuable to human survival, and (bonus points) the critical faculty itself aids poetic composition…

Thomas

and let me just take a sentence to extol the wonders of wild honey, where you can taste the flowers, and guess from which fields the nectar was gathered, and you can’t taste the barrel, or the plywood. and which is absolutely free, even if it’s a bitch to gather, and you can find even in the cities.