Alison said, remarking on Nims' comment on Miss America or Mr. Universe
collapsing, sans the armature of prosody, to a heap of flab:
"Reminds me a little of Celan's comment that craft is like hygiene, merely
something you take for granted. Only Celan's is kind of more to the
point - who wants to make a poem looking like Mr Universe?"
Or Miss America, no?
I think the unintended humor Weinberger finds in the comment is that outer
"beauty" for Nims is so transparently revealed as constructed category
(beauty contestants and contests(!)-- of which there are, incidentally and
of course, also too many to count in Poetry World). The obvious and ironic
question raised by his trope, then, is the historical status of the "inner
armature": Its purported skeletal and tendoned nature (look at Candice's
chap from the Prospect as easy, vulgar target here) is shown (poor Dr.
Nims!) by the X-ray of rhetoric to be mere artifice and contingency,
elevated by ideology to the status of transcendent art...
Something like the Antin/Perloff pyramid, in fact, though differences would
be important to note in that regard...
Kent
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