Thanks for this
Gosh and I thought you had to just grow a beard and wear sandals (lovingly
strokes beard wiggles toes in sandals -(few women had beards so could not
possibly be poets
P bearded sandalled P
-----Original Message-----
From: Poetryetc provides a venue for a dialogue relating to poetry and
poetics [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Max Richards
Sent: 22 February 2007 07:34
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Garrison Keillor on poets
In the current salon.com G Keillor jokes about who not to have lunch with...
'.... Conviviality is no small achievement. Back when I was young, most
major
American writers seemed to be alcoholic or suicidal or both, and we students
absorbed the notion that the true sign of brilliance is to be seriously
screwed
up. The true poet is haunted by livid demons, brave, doomed, terribly
wounded,
and if one was (as I was) relatively unscratched, you concealed this and
tried
to impersonate doom.
The prime minister of high culture was T.S. Eliot, who suffered from a lousy
marriage and hated his job and so wrote "The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock," a
small, dark mopefest of a poem in which old Pru worries about whether to eat
a
peach or roll up his trousers. This poem pretty much killed off the pleasure
of
poetry for millions of people who got dragged through it in high school. The
first line of "Prufrock," as you may recall, was "S'io credesse che mia
risposta
fosse" -- he opened with six lines of a language 99 percent of his readers
do
not understand! How better to identify yourself as a serious poet than to be
incomprehensible?
So the best minds of my generation skipped poetry and became historians or
went
into business or took up farming. Who would make a career out of pretending
to
be crippled? And they sensed that, in the poetry biz, there is not much
conviviality. (They were right.)
The problem with liberals in our time, even though we'd like to think we're
riding high at the moment, is that we're not so much fun to eat lunch with.
We
carry an air of self-righteous sorrow about hunger, global warming,
homelessness, tax inequity, the heartlessness of big corporations, and a
list of
crises as long as your arm. You eat lunch with a liberal and you are ashamed
to
order dessert.'
etc, etc. I love the word mopefest. (I think Prufrock predates TSE's
marriage.)
M
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