Check out this hilarious (and error-riddled) piece by an American journalist
in a Brit journal that blurbs itself as "_the_ magazine for the
intellectually curious general reader...the intelligent monthly based in
Britain - but with an international mind and an international
readership"--but with no fact-checker on staff apparently....
Let's hear it for Dana Gioia, Slo-Po!
Candice
(From the July 6th Chronicle of Hire Ed)
A glance at the July issue of "Prospect":
The sorry state of contemporary American poetry
Michael Lind, a journalist, poet, and novelist, skewers the
current state of American poetry and places the blame squarely
at the feet of T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and American academics
who have warped poetry into an esoteric, "coterie art that would
ward off the uninitiated." Mr. Lind sees this as a recent
phenomenon; it was only in the 20's and 30's, he reminds us,
that Robert Frost was a celebrity and Edna St. Vincent Millay
had her own radio show. In the United States, Mr. Lind writes grimly,
"almost all of the prestige poetry is written in the early 20th-century mode
of 'free verse' -- that is to say, lines of prose chopped up at arbitrary
points -- and almost all of it consists of relatively short poems." Compare
this with Britain, Mr. Lind continues, where star poets like James Fenton
and Wendy Cope "use traditional verse technique to write about a range of
subjects in a variety of genres, including political satire and light
verse." The Catch-22 of America's academic poetry, he writes, is that
"hardly anyone writes poetry in the U.S. other than professors -- and hardly
anybody reads it, other than the professors who write it." Mr. Lind hails
Dana Gioia as a saving grace of formalism in American poetry; one whose
mastery of form, lyrical prowess, diversity of technique, and musical
cadences harken back to the poetic days of yore. Though Mr. Gioia may be
"considered a slow writer by members of the campus poetry subculture who
crank out a new collection of poems every year or so (it's easy to be
prolific when your lines don't scan or rhyme)," Mr. Lind sneers, there's no
need to worry about the peanut gallery. It's just full of envious "American
poets who cannot tell the difference between a heroic quatrain and an Alcaic
stanza [but] have convinced themselves that they are poets."
The article is available online at
http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/whats_new.html
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