I couldn't agree more. What's called for in this instance is an intense
engagement, not uncontrolled and self-parodying exfoliation.
>
>
>On another note I am, shall I say, surprised, as an American, to hear
>Sharon Olds' name come up here. My 18 and 19 year old students adore her
>work:
>
>In the last days of my father's life
>I tried to name his smell--like yeast,
>ochre catalyst feeding in liquid,
>eating malt, excreting mash--
>sour ferment, intoxicant, exaltant, the
>strong drink of my father's sweat,
>I bent down over the hospital bed
>and smelled it. It smelled like wet cement,
>a sidewalk of crushed granite, quartz
>and Jurassic shale, or the sour odor
>of the hammered copper humidor
>full of moist, bent, blackish
>shreds of pipe tobacco; or the smelling-salts
>tang of chlorine on the concrete floor of the
>changing room at the pool in summer. . . .
>
>And so on. Very imaginative stuff. I might risk the ever-forbidden
>paraphrase: "As I have now the opportunity to write about this life
>experience I think I shall remember leaning down and catching a whiff of my
>father dying--shall I compare his rotting body to a. . .to a what? Perhaps
>to just as many things as I can in all of my splendid poetic imagination
>remember or invent. I am after all a poet awash in the sensorium and alert
>to the endless power of simile or the power of simile deployed endlessly,
>which is, after all, my power. My powers are mighty; I am quite charmed by
>my vocation; it compensates for my experience and I mean to show you what I
>can do."
>
>These are not convincing lies. This is a form of self-congratulation,
>unintentionally comic, as offensive in its perpetuation of the trite
>rhythms and structure of a phrase such as "the/strong drink of my father's
>sweat" as in the violence done to her father. Compare Faulkner's _As I Lay
>Dying_, where the comedy is intentional.
>
>KT
>
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