Check out Kasey Mohammad's spoof on the Tayson article at lime tree.
Monday, January 31, 2005
Friday, January 28, 2005
Also in the news . . .
The Grand Dame of Poetry Criticism
No one has had the public impact of the rigorously untheoretical Helen Vendler
http://chronicle.com
Section: Research & Publishing
Volume 51, Issue 21, Page A14
Ms. Vendler does not do e-mail. Somehow this is not surprising. Prolonged reading of her work conveys the sense of a mind utterly devoted to poetry, a woman not at all shy about her bookishness. "I am not interested in groups," Ms. Vendler said during a panel discussion in New York five years ago. "I have never joined a political party. I have never voted. I have never registered to vote. I have never gone to a church. I have never belonged to a club. I've never belonged to anything." For the journalist seeking to interview her, it is something of a relief to learn that she has a telephone.
and . . .
She says she "wanders the earth" asking people if they know of any major 30-year-old poets she should read. "And they all say, 'Not really.' I don't know if we're in a lull. There are competent poets, but nobody taking the world by storm the way Ginsberg did, or Lowell did. I worry about it."
This article, "The Grand Dame of Poetry Criticism," is available online at this address:
http://chronicle.com/temp/email.php?id=4zs8muwq9t15s1gdt9zyypi1mnptroyk
This article will be available to non-subscribers of The Chronicle for up to five days after it is e-mailed.
The article is always available to Chronicle subscribers at this address:
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i21/21a01401.htm
The Grand Dame of Poetry Criticism
No one has had the public impact of the rigorously untheoretical Helen Vendler
http://chronicle.com
Section: Research & Publishing
Volume 51, Issue 21, Page A14
Ms. Vendler does not do e-mail. Somehow this is not surprising. Prolonged reading of her work conveys the sense of a mind utterly devoted to poetry, a woman not at all shy about her bookishness. "I am not interested in groups," Ms. Vendler said during a panel discussion in New York five years ago. "I have never joined a political party. I have never voted. I have never registered to vote. I have never gone to a church. I have never belonged to a club. I've never belonged to anything." For the journalist seeking to interview her, it is something of a relief to learn that she has a telephone.
and . . .
She says she "wanders the earth" asking people if they know of any major 30-year-old poets she should read. "And they all say, 'Not really.' I don't know if we're in a lull. There are competent poets, but nobody taking the world by storm the way Ginsberg did, or Lowell did. I worry about it."
This article, "The Grand Dame of Poetry Criticism," is available online at this address:
http://chronicle.com/temp/email.php?id=4zs8muwq9t15s1gdt9zyypi1mnptroyk
This article will be available to non-subscribers of The Chronicle for up to five days after it is e-mailed.
The article is always available to Chronicle subscribers at this address:
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i21/21a01401.htm
from the Academy of American poets website...
January 28: Back Down to Earth
Richard Tayson on Walt Whitman’s Preface to the 1855 Leaves of Grass
Walt Whitman’s Preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, now celebrating its sesquicentennial, is the strongest advice I know against Language Poetry, now exerting a force unequal to its achievement in current American poetry. For all it virtues, including a radical emphasis on sonic qualities of ever-various, orgiastic and intoxicating American language, and what Paul Hoover terms its "challenge to the male-dominant hierarchy" and its "actuality in words," Language Poetry’s denunciation of the human behind the words is its dangerous (and, likely for its practitioners, enticing) legacy.1 As Jorie Graham states, one often sees in language poets "the dismantling of articulate speech," the goal of which appears (distressingly) to be " a language free of its user."2 If any poet ever wished to be irrefutably associated, inseparably married to his use of language, it was the body and soul of Walt Whitman.
Since perhaps the mid-eighties, language poetry has gained influence over younger poets, especially those graduating from creative writing programs and publishing in literary journals. The direction that influence has taken has been to focus these youthful works on a lack of narrative, a rejection of closure, an emphasis on textuality, and extreme attention to the material physicality of the shape and sound of words (or even letters) at the expense of what Muriel Rukeyser, a quintessential Whitmanian, terms "a triadic relation" of "the poet, the poem, and the audience."3 Many of our literary magazines now (and increasingly so) contain work that is divorced from daily life, from politics, and—most distressing of all—from the reader whom one presumes is the reason for publishing it in the first place. The result is an onanism that threatens to rob air from the fire of the creative process. Language poetry, which takes its genesis from Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, with links perhaps to Ezra Pound (and James Joyce’s linguistic creations?), may also be seen as having ties to surrealism and other mostly European innovations, such as Dadaism and, in its experimentation with typography, Concrete Poetry à la Apollinaire. Perhaps, though this is a stretch, it may reach as far back as George Herbert’s "Easter-wings." Our poets, who Whitman describes as those able to "make every word he speaks draw blood," appear to be dangerously close to creating a bloodless enterprise.
it goes on . . .
January 28: Back Down to Earth
Richard Tayson on Walt Whitman’s Preface to the 1855 Leaves of Grass
Walt Whitman’s Preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, now celebrating its sesquicentennial, is the strongest advice I know against Language Poetry, now exerting a force unequal to its achievement in current American poetry. For all it virtues, including a radical emphasis on sonic qualities of ever-various, orgiastic and intoxicating American language, and what Paul Hoover terms its "challenge to the male-dominant hierarchy" and its "actuality in words," Language Poetry’s denunciation of the human behind the words is its dangerous (and, likely for its practitioners, enticing) legacy.1 As Jorie Graham states, one often sees in language poets "the dismantling of articulate speech," the goal of which appears (distressingly) to be " a language free of its user."2 If any poet ever wished to be irrefutably associated, inseparably married to his use of language, it was the body and soul of Walt Whitman.
Since perhaps the mid-eighties, language poetry has gained influence over younger poets, especially those graduating from creative writing programs and publishing in literary journals. The direction that influence has taken has been to focus these youthful works on a lack of narrative, a rejection of closure, an emphasis on textuality, and extreme attention to the material physicality of the shape and sound of words (or even letters) at the expense of what Muriel Rukeyser, a quintessential Whitmanian, terms "a triadic relation" of "the poet, the poem, and the audience."3 Many of our literary magazines now (and increasingly so) contain work that is divorced from daily life, from politics, and—most distressing of all—from the reader whom one presumes is the reason for publishing it in the first place. The result is an onanism that threatens to rob air from the fire of the creative process. Language poetry, which takes its genesis from Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, with links perhaps to Ezra Pound (and James Joyce’s linguistic creations?), may also be seen as having ties to surrealism and other mostly European innovations, such as Dadaism and, in its experimentation with typography, Concrete Poetry à la Apollinaire. Perhaps, though this is a stretch, it may reach as far back as George Herbert’s "Easter-wings." Our poets, who Whitman describes as those able to "make every word he speaks draw blood," appear to be dangerously close to creating a bloodless enterprise.
it goes on . . .
