Pierre Joris wrote:
> Alison -- it was/is depressing -- having complained for years that the
> NYTBR didn't review poetry seriosuly or consistently, it now looks like
> there will be a regular commentator, said David Orr, a lawyer by
> profession, who every 4 or 6 weeks will write such a column. I guess
> the idea that the NYTBR could have done something more interesting than
> another sewered (hmm, I meant to write skewered) smat-ass put-downer --
> the poetry as "primarily an academic art" line immediately got my
> hackles up -- was self-delusion to start with. -- Pierre
I will say at the outset that since I first read Jorie Graham's poetry,
I disliked it. I don't know why. You can meet someone and take a
distaste to them at once and repeated exposures don't go a long way to
dispelling the first impression. I got a sense of a person who takes
the simplest concept and pushes it into an atmosphere-free zone
reminiscent of the Andes.
My opinion is worth exactly what you paid for it: nothing.
First, I confused David Orr with Gregory Orr. Whoops...but not really.
A poet is as prone to a velvet hatchet murder as anyone else. The way
he presented Graham would find its equivalent in writing a headline like
"C. K. Williams, Jew Undercover" or "C. D. Wright, the Hillbilly Who
Learned to Rede Gud." Well, that's not subtle at all, is it? It's the
references around Graham that bother me: calling the Iowa Writer's
Workshop the "death star of MFA programs" (what exactly does that
*mean*, by the way?), the comment about her students having a habit of
winning contests she judges (here we go again), and the association with
Helen Vendler. The latter may indeed be the most powerful critic in
American poetry in the last 50 years, but this plays right into the
suggestion I've heard elsewere (no I don't know the names) that Vendler
coaches Graham on what to write and how to write it, i.e., that she's
Helen Vendler's Fredo Corleone.
I happened to read the Praying poems when they appeared in APR, and I
found them surprisingly moving. The flaw I found in Graham that I could
not get past was either a lack of the demonic or of (God bless the mark)
common humanity. Well, I am oversimplifying but it's late at night.
But I found in the Praying poems what Sexton called the awful rowing
toward God, at ;east people reaching toward their fellows.
So Orr in the end calls her diffuse and foggy. Anyone here who hasn't
been diffuse and foggy at least once, please stand up. Jorie Graham
seems to have committed the unforgivable sin of American poets: she
became successful and a target of envy. I may just go out and buy
Overlord and make her more so.
ken
Kenneth Wolman http://kenwolman.com http://kenwolman.blogspot.com
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"Poetry is tribal not material....this is where you can remember the good
times along with the worst; where you are not allowed to forget the worst,
else you cannot be healed."--C. D. Wright
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