Very instructive pairing of critical perspectives here, courtesy of
Sevanthi. If Graham's work exemplifies "neo-romantic bombast" (as Henry
labels it elsewhere), surely Logan's work (criticism) exemplifies in this
instance neo- (or maybe more accurately, para-)critical bombast. Has
contemporary poetry become so assimilated to economies of scale that
largesse is indistinguishable from largeness, grandeur from grandiosity,
"big-picture" perspective from pretentiousness?
A serious question posed with no intent to bait anyone (let alone provoke
indignant defenses of Gould's or Logan's life/work)--a question about
size/scale that's obviously related to my original point re Graham and
intolerance of or toward the intellectual/philosophical poem, which I sense
as one prevailing attitude in the current poetic culture. What strikes me as
continuous between these two statements by Gould and Logan is not merely the
recourse to "bombast" as a damning term for Graham's work but the expressed
desire for the philosophic to yield to the lyric.
Why should it?
Candice
Henry Gould on Graham:
>> After looking at these poems, I still think there's a tendency to
>> bombast, which intrudes in the gap between some initial,
>> specific imagery (minnows, an Italian painting, water flowing, etc)
>> and the wide, grandiose emotive-spiritual gestures the images
>> are meant to trigger. This rather huge gap between a particular image
>> and a big abstract statement is smoothed over by her emphatically
>> flowing syntax, but in my opinion it's not a very solid bond.
>
William Logan on Graham:
> "Graham imagines herself a visionary (poets writing this badly almost always
> have high-minded reasons)—otherwise it would be difficult to explain the
> self-drama, the absence of humor (humor would make her vulnerable), the way
> the poems gassily expand to fill available space. There’s a rare glimmer of
> the lyric poet she once was (“where the raven suddenly wetly and rawly/
> roughens the low vacillations of various windsweeping/ hushings”), but
> Graham has lost her sense of embarrassment and humility. Reading her
> hither-thither intellectualizing, I remembered Gloria Swanson’s lines in
> Sunset Boulevard—“I am big. It’s the pictures that got small.” In these
> numbed, overemphatic, philosophic poems, every gesture will be stared at,
> though it means almost nothing. Dante planned no better punishment for
> ambition."
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