I'm excerpting 15 comments (anonymously) from [New-Poetry]:
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1) Hard to make a strong case for the idea that Lowell wrote free verse
because he wasn't skilled enough to manage form.
2) Interesting non-standard use of the word "best" throughout that article.
3) Where did this idiotic little recap of various new formalist cliches
appear?
Michael Lind has one good book, _Up from Conservatism_, but it
ain't poetry. I tried to read his Alamo poem, but it was too painfully bad.
To point out various specific wrongs:
--Seamus Heaney does not consider himself a "British" poet, and has loudly
protested his being named so in the Field Day pamphlet "open letter."
--neither Eliot nor Pound had a Ph.D.
--a stunning misreading of the Lowell quote about experience and meter.
Lowell did _not_ say verse was "too hard."
--neither Black Mountain, Deep Image, or language poetry were movements of
a "handful of professors." Olson was a professor only in the loosest
possible sense, and language writing was _outside_ academic poetry for its
first ten years or so.
--Ashbery may be a "professor" by virtue of having a teaching job, but he
has no Ph.D. and was not a professor until _after_ he'd become a major poet.
The bulk of Lind's article is simply evidence-free assertion the
"best" and a puff piece on Gioia, who should be embarrassed to have such
defenders. Though I disagreed with Gioia's manifesto, it was at least
something worth arguing about.
4) "The stuff on Lowell was interesting as well. Though I do not like
Lowell's work, he did possess a sense of craft. His absolute dismissal of
free verse is interesting. But rather than looking at things that are
disagreeable, are there ideas/points in the article with which people agreed?"
Lind ruins his credibilty so quickly that's it's hard to agree with him
even where one might be inclined to do so. Defining free verse as "prose
chopped up at arbitrary points" is so willfully stupid--are Whitman's lines
arbitrary? Or Williams's? Or Neruda's? Or Creeley's? Or Levertov's--makes
clear that this is more propaganda than considered argument. (Ah, if only
Song of Myself were in terza rima, and Spring and All a sonnet sequence).
I'm not sure how this absolute dismissal is "interesting." It's certainly
not new. Of course one could look at the worst free verse currently being
written and jump to the conclusion that ALL free verse is worthless, but
that's a little like looking at George Bush and assuming that ALL
Republicans are inarticulate dimwits. Which, of course, they aren't.
I'm inclined to agree with his critique of Eliot and Pound as elitist, but
this is hardly a breathtaking observation. And for all Eliot's elitism he
had, and I would guess still has, a huge and varied readership. Is there a
better-known or more widely read American poem than The Wasteland? I also
think there are serious problems with American poets being so
thorougly absorbed into academia, but Lind's inflated rhetoric--the golden
age ended when "a gang of professors hijacked American poetry"--wouldn't
allow him
much useful insight on this subject.
5) [snip] > I'm inclined to agree with his critique of Eliot and Pound as
elitist, but
> this is hardly a breathtaking observation. And for all Eliot's elitism he
> had, and I would guess still has, a huge and varied readership. Is there a
> better-known or more widely read American poem than The Wasteland? I also
> think there are serious problems with American poets being so thorougly
> absorbed into academia, but Lind's inflated rhetoric--the golden age ended
> when "a gang of professors hijacked American poetry"--wouldn't allow him
> much useful insight on this subject.
Exactly. Indeed, "The Waste Land" was made popular by non-academics, not
by the "professors" Lind derides. I'm reminded of Edmund Wilson's
observation in _Axel's Castle_: "where some of even the finest
intelligences of the elder generation read "The Waste Land" with blankness
or laughter, the young had
recognized a poet."
6) Mr. Lind's ignorance of the history, practice, and purpose of free verse
appears to be total.
7) Just caught up with this. But-but-but-but-but in the Cantos the Mandarin
IS accompanied by its translation. This article is very funny. I read it to
my neighbors cat.
8) > TS Eliot and Ezra Pound--two expatriate Americans with PhDs--inspired
> several generations of literary intellectuals to believe that, in Eliot's
> words, "poets in our civilisation, as it exists at present, must be
> difficult."
Slipshod work here. Neither had a Ph. D.
9) A friend of mine, who is an editor, said this:
" 'Hardly anyone writes poetry in the US other than professors--and hardly
anybody reads it, other than the professors who write it.' What is
remarkable is that everything in the statement is upside down.Contrasted
with US vitality the situation in Britain is pitiful. And in the US the
spread of the audience outside academic walls has been the big story of the
last 10 - 12 years."
Now, what I think points to a book brought to my attention a few months
ago: John Aldredge's In Search of Heresy: American Literature in an Age of
Conformity. Aldredge (and correct me if I'm mistaken, Carlo) claims
that academia through the pressures of publish or perish turned academic
scholars into more commercial writers and through this homogenized and
diluted a great deal of American literature after WWII.
I'm surprised that Lind brings Rexroth up in his essay. The irony of
someone like Lind bringing up Rexroth should not be lost. Rexroth would
have chewed him out if he'd read that article. The more we delve into the
article, the more we see how irresponsible an article it is. Why would Lind
publish this article in the UK? Would he publish something like that in
the US?
10) Unfortunately, yes. Lind's rant is silly, ill-informed, and
paranoid. Gioia would be better served by a critic who pays more
attention to the poetry, less to global conspiracy theories.
11) Glad I lurked for awhile on Lind's piece. Michael is an interesting
fellow. Once an acolyte of Bill Buckley's on the National Review, he
decided to turn against Conservatism, which is always a good idea if you
want a writing career, and now it's a little tough to tell where his
politics are, since the Liberals aren't inclined to trust him either. He's
down here with the rest of us political junkies in DC right now, and is the
political editor for Harpers Magazine. He is actually primarily a political
writer who does quite a bit of poetry "on the side."
I am not totally sure how Michael got involved with poetry, but the
Formalistas, I think, keep him at arm's length because they regard him as
sort of a loose cannon, in that he fires rather quickly from the hip. This
is due, at least in part, to the fact that if you're a journalist, which he
is, a hit or an error today will quickly be forgotten by the next issue of
the newspaper. But they need the column inches filled today.
This tends to be a problem when you use this methodology in writing
academic or semi-academic criticism. Professors--who work with criticism
day in and day out, unlike commercial writers--are always there ready to
nail you with obvious inaccuracies like the Heaney-British(!) thing. (Which
my Dublin-born wife would also be the first to clobber him with.) When a
layman takes on this kind of stuff he has to work twice as hard, just to
maintain credibility amongst the profs. Michael makes some interesting
arguments here, but they are undercut and at times buried by the
inaccuracies of the citations.
"The Alamo"--not sure that the whole book is "painfully bad" but some
verses sure are. It was a noble experiment. I am, of course, a huge fan of
formal verse, and Michael does well with his version of epic meter and
rhyme in this book, but a couple hundred pages of this, alas, just don't
seem to work well in English anymore, and the engine creaks from time to
time with the excruciating labor involved in simply maintaining the structure.
Unless any of you strenuously object, I would like to "digest" this
particular email chain, delete the names to protect the innocent, and email
it to Lind. I think he needs to see this stuff before he writes another
piece in this area. I find the criticism here a little nasty, but not
particularly invalid. I think it would be good for him to read it.
12) Michael's problem for me is not inaccuracy--who cares what nationality
Heaney thinks he is. Michael's problem is that he knows very little about
poetry.
13) with all due respect, the easy and not necessarily accurate linking of
epithets (professor-poet) is a strategy of attack I've noticed from the
right (although you say Lind is a conservative apostate...like Brock?)
What is a professor-poet? Lind seems to be assuming that no New Formalists
are professors, which is inaccurate, and he definitely assumes
professorship for some free verse poets who aren't professors.
14) I find in cases like this that whatever sentiments the writer may have,
and whatever sentiments I as reader may have, when I come across so many
factual errors in a short piece I am automatically suspicious of whatever
conclusions the author may draw. It simply makes me believe whoever the
writer is or whatever he is writing on, he doesn't really know what he's
talking about.
15) Lind's article is monumentally ignorant of poetry, and a slap in the
face to all of us who care about it.
(There are currently dozen's of radio broadcasts around this great nation
featuring poets. The poet Jack Foley who has a weekly radio program in San
Francisco recently sent me a tape of an interview he did
with-------------------------Dana Gioia on his radio show. Lind does point
out that Pound had his own radio show but that was before FM became
popular. I guess we could split hairs over national syndication.)
For the entire thread:
http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/2001-June/thread.html#3133
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