 |
 |
Hi Jon, just some comments. <<It isn't often noticed that the successful political poetry of the past is staunchly conservative. >> Well, I think this is dependent upon that "successful." For surely if one lauds the Emperor, one will be successful, no? the poem will be dispersed throughout the Empire and copied on all the scrolls? So by definition, it would have to be a staunchly conservative political poetry that would receive the most press and notice. However, some might argue that the best political poetry is satire. <<Maybe poets of the past felt that politics weren't really very important, so they might as well adopt whichever politics are expedient for their career.>> I don't know, you use the example of Eliot and MacDiarmid, and they certainly don't seem illustrative of those who thought that politics weren't important. Whatever one may say about them, they were both poets of deeply held social and political views. I would think their correspondence was more dependent upon a mutual respect, an understanding of a common ground and measures of discourse, and so could accomodate such divergent views. << Literary revolutionaries now are the ones who wear sandals instead of loafers in the English Department coffee room. There's something pathetic about a bohemian with a fellowship.>> Well, you know I can't help but think about those old, real, Bohemians, like Cesar Vallejo in Trujillo who could have used a fellowship. Perhaps most in English Departments come from the same background, but I'm not certain of that. I don't find much use in this sort of dismissal on the basis of one's external definition and often shallow understanding of another, in poetry, or anywhere. Which is why I keep emphasizing that it is the work that matters, the particular, not the anecdotal or the personal or the use of others to illustrate one's ideas. <<Incidentally the Merriam Webster College Dictionary, which is considered standard at least for US usage, says that avant-garde can be an adjective and gives "avant-garde writers" as an example.>> Yes, our Webster's. I wasn't unaware that the term is legally an adjective, just arguing for a more adjectival usage of it in this discussion. Even your quote uses it as an adjective for the writers, not the work, and I was thinking as an adjective of the work, it would allow more more. <<----------------------------------------------- Yesterday by accident I came across one of the few recent poetry books that seems worthy of my attention: Looking for Poetry: Poems by Carlos Drummond de Andrade and Rafael Alberti / Songs from the Quechua,>> Yes, Andrade and Alberti will reward any further study! As for Quechua, it is a very vivid language, but perhaps best approached on its own terms. There's a book, Signs, Songs, and Memory in the Andes: Translating Quechua Language and Culture by Regina Harrison that is particularly adept at conveying the quality of the poetry and its much different cultural context. The Spanish texts often added a gloss of orthodoxy. << Bircumshaw is summed up by its statement, drawn from Andrew Jordan, that "the middle-classes have created a hegemony in the poetry world, while sounding off about tolerance and inclusion..." >> Yes, good summary, but my point is still why should a piece which so purports to be a book review be so summarized? no mention of the work, the book, a poem, etc. <<Rebecca Seiferle's comments should be footnoted to record that the reviewer's observations of Ruth Padel's "sexiness' were an extension of the remark quoted in the review's first sentence that "Ruth Padel is 'the sexiest voice in British poetry,'" attributed to Maggie O'Farrell.>> thanks for the footnote. When I argued against sexiness as a criteria for reviews of poetry collections, I mentioned whether it was viewed "pro or con," the pro was the original remark of O'Farrell's upon which I cast equal aspersion. :) As for your original question on Sappho which was I think how she became so famous in such a patriarchal society? more or less, my view is that Sappho became much more disturbing to later societies than she was in her own. She was an aristocrat, apparently connected to a cult of Aphrodite, mentored young women, prior to their marriage, and so inhabited a realm--of love, of feminine experience, of the worship of Aphrodite--that Greek society allowed to women. If she had been talking in the Polis, that would have been another matter. Also the Greeks knew more of her than we do, so perhaps there was some other way in which her work resonated with her culture. So little of her work has survived because the very qualities that granted her esteem in her own culture became reasons to burn her work in subsequent eras. I think it's simply that the uses of power are rarely simplistic, and history is not particularly progressive; between us and her perhaps there is more abyss than asce! nt. Best, Rebecca Rebecca Seiferle www.thedrunkenboat.com