From: Candice Ward <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Sat, 25 Nov 2000 00:00:52 -0500
To: Jill Jones <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: 3RR has an educational license
Hi, Jill,
Could you please do me a favor and post this to poetryetc? (I can't
list-post from this computer, but I'm steaming over Hugh's latest!) Thanks
very much--Candice
Hugh,
I think your mixed and muddled "defenses" of 3RRR and _Invisible Tattoos_
pretty well indicate why you have such a problem with Alison's review,
namely, that it's based on arguments to do with what poetry is today, for
better and for worse. An adequate response to her review must address those
arguments: Alison doesn't, for instance, compare Williams's poetry to
Baudelaire's, but rather recalls his "delirious importuning" to "'always be
drunk'" in response to Williams's own "Drink, they say," etc. Nor does she
view _Invisible Tattoos_ "through the history of developments in prosody,"
but rather makes brief reference to the dilemma of writing poetry in an age
of "free verse," with its much greater prosodic challenges than were faced
by the rhymesters of a century ago. So your retort ("kind of the reviewer to
insist on such high standards") is inadequate both because it's simply
puerile and because it so widely misses the mark as a rejoinder to her
point.
But even that wide a miss is nothing compared to your would-be countering of
Coral's "I would listen in to 3RRR, but I have a life" with a vague,
rambling assertion of this program's "educational license." (Coral said "I
have a life," not "I lack a license" and certainly not "I need an
education.") You don't even seem to be able to stick to the tenets of your
own argument, in fact, first appealing to copyright as a reason for not
defending Williams by quoting from her work, then quoting three stanzas from
a poem about Elle Macpherson (apparently to show something relevant--but
what? I wonder--to Williams's interest in Spanish and the poetry of
Colombia).
While leaving it to others with greater expertise than mine on "spoken word"
poetry (such as Doug Barbour) to address those points, I would like to
mention your self-contradicting postscript on technique vs. subject matter.
Never mind the self-defeating appeal to Philip Larkin, though, how does your
abrupt reversal affirming subject matter over technique square with a
defense of Williams's poetry based on "spoken word" techniques?
Time to get out the suppositories, Hugh, or get off the pot--don't you
think?
Candice
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