I guess we're about to witness many people - us US poets - blow air etc.
over Paglia.
I don't know if I want to hear it. But nothing like the attraction of
yesterday or the fearless "nostalgia be good" critic. There's always
somebody doing that job. Paglia apparently took it. And there will always be
those that love to read it. I guess it's a relief not be among the chosen
poets, several of whom I read and like. It's just hard to look through the
refractions in this kind of window.

Stephen V


Talking with literary provocateur Camille Paglia

The pleasures of poetry
        
    
     
         BY JOHN FREEMAN
John Freeman is a writer in New York.

March 27, 2005

The Hubba-Bubba pink cover art on her new book notwithstanding, Camille
Paglia is courting a lower profile these days. "Oscar Wilde was a huge
influence on me," says the firebrand on a recent Thursday at the
Philadelphia College of Art, where she has taught for two decades. "He
believed in the strong critic, and I've done that. I'm there in most of my
books; boy am I there. With 'Break, Blow, Burn,' however, I tried to make
myself as invisible as possible."

It might sound like an odd statement coming from the author of "Sexual
Personae," which put its stiletto heel on the throat of mainstream feminists
and kept it there for much of the '90s. But Paglia, 57, insists she's not
showing a kinder, gentler side, or making nice. After all, "thanks to
Madonna," she says, "the whole pro-sex wing of feminism which had been
ostracized since the '60s came back with a vengeance. And we won. We won
massively. Now, Catherine McKinnon, Andrea Dworkin, you hardly see their
names anywhere."

No, by her estimates those battles are now border skirmishes. What Paglia
wants to do next is get Americans to read poetry again. And so we have
"Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads 43 of the World's Best Poems"
(Pantheon, $20). "This took me five years," Paglia says, dressed tidily in a
check blazer and jeans, hair sporting the trademark feather and wave. "Along
the way I've encountered so many people in the publishing world, in
magazines, who said to me, you know, 'I always keep up with the new novels,
but not poetry.' These are really literary people, and even they feel poetry
no longer speaks to them."

So Paglia has put down her Molotov cocktails and picked up the lyre to sing
the praises of 43 poems, ranging from Shakespeare and Wordsworth to Sylvia
Plath and Gary Snyder. An essay follows each poem that explains the poet's
significance and then proceeds to describe what is interesting, unique and,
yes, pleasure-giving about the poem. "The child-like pleasure principle is
crucial to approaching art," Paglia says. "If you don't approach art like
that, then you don't know anything about how it's made!"

Paglia first encountered poetry as a child, and even tried writing it well
into her late teens. She suspects this early appreciation came from a
certain Italian-American culture of good craftsmanship. "All four of my
grandparents were born in Italy; my mother was born there. From my earliest
years, they gave me little objects from the Vatican, little statuaries, a
sense of stone-cutting, and basket-weaving, and wood-working. No matter what
your job was during the day, there was a sense of the made object."

In "Break, Blow, Burn," Paglia approaches poetry with a similar kind of
reverence for craft, noting, for example, the way Shakespeare strings a
sentence along in Sonnet 29 to create a palpable tension, leaving it
unrelieved until the poem's final rhyming couplet, "For thy sweet love
remembered such wealth brings/ That then I scorn to change my state with
kings." It is no accident that the book's title comes from a poem by Donne.
"I've always loved that poem," says Paglia, "in part because he compares God
to a potter."

In addition to craft, the other qualities key to Paglia are spontaneity and
improvisation. It's why she has chosen Shakespeare and Joni Mitchell as the
two bookends for "Break, Blow, Burn," and it's also why she continued
reading poetry past the age when most Americans put it down. "Poets who had
a big impact on me in the '60s were beatniks, these folks who got drunk and
messed around and were hobos and eccentrics. But then as colleges began to
have more of these creative writing programs, poets retreated to a world of
their own. They became more and more insular, and their world became more
and more professionalized."

Paglia puts some of the blame for poetry's further marginalization on
critics' shoulders, too. "Thanks to 25 years of post-structuralism in our
elite colleges, we have this idea now that you are supposed to use your
pseudo-sociological critical eye to look down on the work and find
everything that's wrong with it," Paglia says, talking so quickly she has to
pause and take a deep breath before continuing. "The racism, sexism,
homophobia, imperialism. This style of teaching just nips students'
enthusiasm in the bud."

A professor for more than 34 years, Paglia has structured "Break, Blow,
Burn" like a class in reading poetry, but it also feels like a strange kind
of greatest-hits collection. William Blake rubs shoulders with Chuck
Wachtel; California poet Wanda Coleman nuzzles William Carlos Williams.
Paglia admits her selection is a bit eccentric, and she wishes it could be
longer.

"I searched and searched for the [right] Bukowski poem," Paglia says,
revealing her predisposition to some old favorites. "But I couldn't find it.
I found a lot of poems where there is great stuff in the poem but no truly
great poem." From beyond the grave, Bukowski has no reason to sniff,
however. Other poets who didn't make the cut include Seamus Heaney, John
Ashbery and virtually every living American who has won the Pulitzer Prize.

Instead, we get the classics, and happy surprises, and poems by folks such
as Paul Blackburn, whose "The Once Over" describes a subway car traveling
downtown, its passengers enraptured by the image of a beautiful woman. "It
has been condemned for sexism, as you can imagine," Paglia says, once again
treading across controversy's high wire. "But this to me is a classic poem
of my time. There's a mysterious girl in a beautiful dress, and everyone is
staring at her. That's it. That's the entire thing. It's so wonderful, the
way he captures that moment, and that's the purpose of reading poetry -
which is that it teaches you to notice what other people don't notice. To
find significance in the insignificant."

Copyright © 2005, Newsday, Inc.