Aside from the fact that, yes, Olson was indebted to S, Harold Bloom is
boring on everything!
But this might be hopeful in a nation where those in charge want to
stop thinking rather than encourage it.
The story the other day on a poll in California (!) that showed that 4
of every 10 students felt that any criticism of the US was
'unpatriotic,' & that because there is criticism outside the country,
it is right & proper to study only patriotically, so to speak. And the
teacher in Arizona whose principal disciplined him because his
students' posters (the ones they made on their own) weren't pro-war
enough!
If Shakespeare might help stop this, then for that reason alone (not
even mentioning how great the work is) let's bigod do it...
Doug
On 15-Apr-05, at 6:29 PM, Alison Croggon wrote:
> Ron Silliman (http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/) has a most interesting
> meditation on the NEA program to bring Shakespeare to the American
> masses
> and its possibly unpredictable effects, given that two American writers
> deeply influenced by WS are Melville and Olson. Dang it, he's right...
> Though I hadn't made the Olson connection - Silliman's idea of
> soliloquy
> rather than "dramatic monologue" in Olson (maybe in a lot of modern
> poetry)
> seems particularly apt.
>
> "So much of Olson reads as tho it were written to be shouted out over a
> heath, or else to be whispered to an audience, a stage whisper capable
> of
> reaching hundreds of ears at once. It is not so much dramatic monolog
> – tho
> Maximus is a persona – as it is soliloquy. Olson’s sense of how a
> sentence
> interacts with the line – something I suspect an entire generation or
> two
> has internalized so deeply we don’t even recognize it – has always
> struck me
> as coming right out of Shakespeare, far more than from Melville or
> Pound.
> This feel for the materiality of the relationship between the two is
> apparent, right there on the surface, in Olson, & through his
> influence it
> radiates outward. I can hear echoes in Creeley, in Duncan or Levertov,
> in
> O’Hara & Whalen & even in Ginsberg. And it ripples again, just a
> little more
> faintly, through every one of us influenced by any of them.
>
> "So the idea of all these people reading, seeing, hearing Shakespeare
> is, I
> suspect, much more of a wild card than the NEA’s leaders may
> comprehend.
> Because where it won’t lead is back to is either the homogenous
> retro-utopia
> of so many a Congressman’s dream nor to the same ol ’ stuff the School
> of
> Quietude has been shoveling. Inseminating Shakespeare into the American
> literary landscape is far more apt to generate a bunch of wild men &
> wyrd
> sisters instead. As Olson himself most certainly was."
>
> I've been seeing a fair bit of WS lately (not only the stuff on my
> theatre
> blog, though I won't forget that Hamlet in the shop front, which was
> just
> wonderful...) Whenever I watch a good production - bad productions
> don't
> count - I come out so vitalised and stimulated. Oddly, only last week I
> watched the dvd of the RSC Macbeth Ron mentions, with Judi Dench and
> Ian
> McKellan. It also features one of my favourite actors, Bob Peck as
> Macduff.
> One of the darkest slants on Macbeth that you can imagine - Macduff
> comes
> out at the end having killed Macbeth, holding the daggers in the same
> way
> that Macbeth did from killing Duncan - and you realise that he's as
> crazy as
> Macbeth was. Now that's bleak; the world may seem to be righted, but
> you
> realise it isn't at all.
>
> Harold Bloom is erudite, of course, but I find him a bore on
> Shakespeare;
> well, I try to read him, but my attention peters out. Maybe it's too
> narrow
> a stream of water in all that rich delta of words. I like Kermode
> better;
> and Jan Kott is wonderful on WS in the mid-20C, and particularly its
> radical
> applications as a critique of power which was I think a big influence
> on the
> RSC. But now I'm really blithering.
>
> Interesting blog comments too - someone claims Shakespeare was a
> Lutheran,
> especially in Hamlet. Hmm. (Reminds me of the joke in Long Day's
> Journey
> into Night that Shakespeare was an Irish Catholic). Considering how
> Hamlet
> turns out, I wouldn't want WS as an advocate.
>
> Best
>
> A
>
> Alison Croggon
>
> Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
> Editor, Masthead: http://masthead.net.au
> Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com
>
>
Douglas Barbour
Department of English
University of Alberta
Edmonton Alberta T6G 2E5 Canada
(780) 436 3320
http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/dbhome.htm
Hand and mind
and heart one
ground to walk on,
field to plough.
Robert Creeley
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