----- Original Message -----
From: "Ana Olinto" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Wednesday, January 01, 2003 6:26 AM
Subject: Re: Last Post Laureate
you are right, doug, she has sometimes great sentences.
my problem is my tendency to judge everything by
great modernist standards.
i'm not a big fan of paz and borges as artists, but only
- particularly borges - as essayists (you can hit me).
i think brazilians are more instintive and creative, tend to be
the best artists of latin america, and hispano-americans are
more serious and universal, tend to be the best intellectuals.
when i talk about anglo-saxon understanding of latin culture,
i have t.s. eliot, pound, marianne moore, elizabeth bishop,
wallace stevens, mina loy, james joyce and similar others
- including some recent revolutionary translators - in mind.
we could also mention kenneth rexroth.
they're all modern, complex - exept rexroth -, and today we
are reactionary (formally), simplistic.
people just TALK about cosmopolitism, but lack of intelligence
means incapacity to UNDERSTAND - and not incapacity
merely to be interested in - another way of thinking.
-------------- ana
Dear Ana,
Formal sophistication is not the only measure of poetic greatness. Formal
developments are only important if they allow readers to grasp new
realities, or old realities in new ways. They are important, that is, if
they serve what can in the largest sense be called content. The situation
is different in visual art. There, Cubism made a guitar and newspaper on a
table something more than trivial; rather timely, even revelatory. (See
Berger's "The Moment of Cubism.") But even in visual art it is unwise to
assume either that formal experimentation is in itself culturally
progressive, or that it makes up for lack of thought about content, or
nullifies any distinction between them. And in poetry those assumptions are
simply specious. Joao Cabral de Melo Neto and Carlos Drummond de Andrade
(whom I can only read, but whom I enjoy, in translation) *show me something
about Brazil - i.e., about "Brazil" as various ways of being and feeling; as
a worldly metaphysics. The Brazilian Language Poets brought together in a
Sun and Moon Press anthology show me nothing. They offer no experience or
insight I might vicariously share. Their poems might as well have been
written in New Jersey. If that is "cosmopolitanism," it's of the type one
could find in any Starbucks or Macdonalds in Rio.
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