Don't take this amiss, Pierre--you're at this
point as anglophone as I am: I've noticed that
among poets and readers who are less secure than
they might be in a given language the poetry
that's less subtle in its effects tends to go
over well. Eliot (who famously thought he could
detect greatness in a poem read to him in a
language about which he was clueless--the "music"
told him, as if there were only one music) is a
case in point. So is the vast popularity of Dylan
Thomas in Latin America. And I'll own up to
having to get past a lot of that in reading
Spanish language poetry. A caveat--some fairly
flamboyant poetry is also pretty great--Neruda at
his best, for instance (not the veinte poemas,
which is pretty much slop but sounds nice to young people and anglophones).
Mark
At 01:39 PM 2/23/2007, you wrote:
>Although I considered myself already a relatively sophisticated
>reader of poetry (as a Franco- & Germano-phone I had read Rimbaud,
>Mallarmé, Lautréamont, breton, and Benn, Brecht, Celan, to name the
>most obvious) & came to English-language poetry via Bob Kaufman,
>Ginsberg & Kerouac, when I started to really
>read into English- language poetry at 16, I went
>or was sent, nearly immediately, to TS
>Eliot — & Prufrock became central : I liked the poem immediately, the
>speech-rhytmns, the weariness, the images (I had visited London &
>recognised the drabness, or thought I did), was awed & delighted by
>the "intellectual" complexity of it & the demands it put on any
>reading beyond the most superficial one & in fact committed it to
>memory — one of the rare ones I did, though I can only remember about
>10 lines of it now. And as I started to write in English at the same
>time, it was an awesome inspiration. A later year I moved to the US
>to go to college here & came right away across Williams — who blew
>Eliot out of the water for me. All the nasty
>stuff is true: anti- semite royalist fascist
>neurotic tight-ass Brit who as WCW said did
>put US poetry back 1/2 century, and yet, there isn't any way around
>Mr. Pruf and the Waste land, and I do agree with most of the points
>in Perloff's more recent essay on Eliot's early work as truly
>constructivist avant-garde, until the end of WWI, the death of his
>lover, and the general collapse of the West sent him to Barclays Bank
>& the Church of England. — Pierre
>
>On Feb 22, 2007, at 7:46 PM, Jon Corelis wrote:
>
>>On encountering Prufrock as a midwestern teenager myself I
>>immediately liked
>>it and didn't worry about the Italian, which I couldn't read
>>either, or
>>about trying to understand it. The important thing was that it
>>sounded
>>neat. That's probably a good description of what is still my
>>aesthetic
>>position.
>>
>>I've always felt the full effect of Prufrock would be brought out
>>by having
>>Boris Karloff read it.
>
>=============================
> "Fascism should more properly
>be called corporatism,since it is the
>merger of state and corporate power."
> — Benito Mussolini
>=============================
>Pierre Joris
>244 Elm Street
>Albany NY 12202
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>http://pierrejoris.com
>Nomadics blog: http://pjoris.blogspot.com
>=========================
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