Alan,
Actually, I had in mind the chapter titled "Audience, Canon" in von
Hallberg's _American Poetry and Culture, 1945-1980_ (Harvard UP, 1985).
Lots of sales numbers, facts there I don't have time to summarize, though
the sketch is partial and ends circa 1980 and I'm sure I'd want to argue
with his conclusions also. Nothing against the buzz of your
extracurricular enthusiasm, no desire, no time tonight to defend the New
Criticism as methodology, pedagogy, or program for American literacy. It
merely _was_, as the vast MFA industry it partly helped create now _is_.
DG is dated because the American university in recent years has
increasingly opted for cultural studies, which has (so far) limited time
for poetry, leaving both poetry and poetry criticism mostly to an MFA world
it dismisses as boring or stupid. Thus DG attacks a university that no
longer exists--or rather it has moved on since he wrote the essay.
Meanwhile a significant part though one hopes not all of the interesting
discourse about poetry now *is* produced outside the academy or on its
periphery, as also the poetry itself. A complex subject. That's all that
I meant. Yes, this sketch is a caricature--no time. I don't know that I
want to say what von Hallberg means by calling Olson's mode of statement
"American." I do know that he once described the discursive mode of a very
early essay of mine as "English." That made me laugh. I was pretty sure it
was merely incoherent.
Work calls, I'm swamped like a ballot box in Florida.
all best
Keith
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