At 10:02 PM 1/1/2005, you wrote:
>What's the most prestigious American poetry journal?
I'll bet we get 10 different answers to Mark's question. My guess is
"Poetry" out of Chicago. Or Triquarterly, if it's still in
business. Or...or...or.... I also have to ask a snotty but absolutely
serious question: who the hell is Charles Simic? I know who Charles Simic
IS, I have read and enjoyed his work, but when did he ascend to the Chair
of St. Ezra and turn himself into an authority figure?
For the claim:
>The favorite kind of poem was a
>first-person, realistic narrative that told of some
>momentous or perfectly trivial experience. It was
>written in free verse often barely distinguished from
>prose. Audacious flights of the imagination and use of
>metaphor were rare. In the age of political
>correctness and the evr-growing lists of forbidden
>words, topics, and attiftudes, irony and wit became
>suspect. And so did humour. The chief strategy of
>these poems was to conceal that they were poems by
>avoiding anything taht seemed too imaginative or
>irreverent. . . ."
>I have no
>doubt that those members of the list whose approbation for contemporary
>standards of poetic excellence has led them to complain that Simic's
>criticisms are insulting hogwash will have instantly spotted which ones
>they were.
I didn't regard Simic's comments as "insulting hogwash" so much as I found
them irrelevant. He seems to suggest that American poets have been
"timidized" by an army of nonartistic censors who will jump on their work
for not being PC. Uh...isn't this thing about Political Correctness
getting old by now? and therefore suspect as a WhippingPerson?
As for the implied comments pointing at self-absorption...and your point
is? If my subject is "me," that is what I have to work with. People will
do what they will do. It may evolve over time. It may evolve into
artistic dead ends. It may flower. It is their work. Is Simic's
tear-down supposed to give contemporary writers an attack of guilt that
they don't write like Europeans and endeavor to change their styles? I am
not you, I am not Transtromer or Zbigniew Herbert, I am not even me much of
the time. I do what I do from where I am. It changes. Fine. To whose
liking?
Ken
-------------------------------------------------
Kenneth
Wolman <http://www.kenwolman.com>http://www.kenwolman.com
http://kenwolman.blogspot.com
"Death is a young poet's romance, and an old man's business."--Richard
Avedon, photographer, 2002
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