Where's 'The Pearl', Ken? Can we read it on line or will you have to
cough up? I want to read it now, and I'd bet I'm not alone.
Andrew
On 16/04/07, joe green <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Ken, from what I can tell you wouldn't have let HV anoint you and if she had and you went along for a bit it wouldn't have lasted long. You're not a corporate type and your alone-ness and particularity are your great strengths. I like your poetry more than I like Blumenthal's and have told you how much I like it and have told others. I remember reading your poem in "The Pearl" all those years ago and how overwhelmed I felt -- the real thing etc. etc.
>
> It's too bad that poetry is caught up in all the usual poetry wars, with all the usual factions and so on but I still know plenty of poets who are not -- for all kinds of reasons and one of the best a blissful unawareness that it goes on. Seems a waste of time to worry about it although as I write this I recognize that I worry about it in the sense that I find the popularity of Silliman's blog very depressing. Seems so dumbed down and seems to me that there was a time when this would be more evident and I do have fun resisting it in various comic ways. Usually I am my only audience.
>
> Every good poet deserves the kind of attention that Vendler lavishes on Paul Muldoon (in this example). Or deserves a good reader somewhere who can let that poet know that someone reads them and likes their poems and begins to see what's there. Trouble is most poetry reviews are written as episodes in various poetry wars with all sorts of simplifying assumptions made and there really aren't that many critics who can do what Vendler does (within her limits -- all sorts of poetry/poets have never appeared to her to have an existence).
>
> As an aside…over the years (15!) I have shown that one poem to a lot of people. (and I think the rest of your stuff damn fine also) and everyone who has read it has thought that it is immortal. This includes a lot of English department types of the old sort (for example the editor of "Portrait of an Artist," the author of I think the best critical work on Coleridge, the editor of King Lear and several drunks of the good old sort) and they all loved it.
>
>
>
> Kenneth Wolman <[log in to unmask]> wrote: Peter Cudmore wrote:
> > Care to elaborate on 'Oy Gevalts', Ken?
> >
> > P
> >
>
> Oy gevalt="pig" Yiddish signifying the fist shaken at the empty heavens,
> the cry of despair, the What Else Can Go Wrong?? Answer: the worst is
> not when we can say This Is The Worst.
>
> Welcome to Oy Gevalt. You don't have to be Jewish, etc.
>
> ken
>
> --
> ------------------
> Ken Wolman rainermaria.typepad.com
>
> "It takes a big man to cry. It takes a really big man to
> laugh at that man."
>
>
>
> ---------------------------------
> Ahhh...imagining that irresistible "new car" smell?
> Check outnew cars at Yahoo! Autos.
>
--
Andrew
http://hispirits.blogspot.com/
http://www.inblogs.net/hispirits
http://www.flickr.com/photos/aburke/
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