i suspect he has just under estimated - everyone!!!!!!!
----Original Message Follows----
From: Mark Weiss <[log in to unmask]>
Reply-To: Poetryetc provides a venue for a dialogue relating to poetry and
poetics <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Bad poetry, etc
Date: Mon, 29 Jan 2007 11:29:40 -0500
Yup, it's ghastly.
At 11:21 AM 1/29/2007, you wrote:
>i do feel mark as if i have failed my sons and my husband and my uncles and
>my brothers and my nephews - i know this guy - hail fellow well met a
>couple of times - and all the time he is brooding about - well - some
>madness
>and his poem is so bad! please don't forget it is bad - beyond men and
>women there is bad poetry!
>how did it get published?
>and he won't answer me
>
>----Original Message Follows----
>From: Mark Weiss <[log in to unmask]>
>Reply-To: Poetryetc provides a venue for a dialogue relating to poetry and
> poetics <[log in to unmask]>
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: Re: Bad poetry, etc
>Date: Mon, 29 Jan 2007 11:15:05 -0500
>
>Agreed--good piece.
>
>McCauley's rhetoric, in his verse and in his reply to Jen, reminded me of
>local bullies like Rush Limbaugh, with I assume similar motivations. On the
>one hand, there's bigotry as a career-builder. I bet this guy gets speaking
>gigs and publication on the strength of it, and he may not even believe all
>of it in his heart-of-hearts. I'm suggesting that there's a degree of
>cold-blooded calculation. It's quite possible, for instance, that Benny
>Hill of sainted memory had excellent table manners when he wasn't on stage.
>On the other hand, there's what appears to be the real thing--the
>globalization of one's personal situation and personal resentments, a
>substitute for thought that we're all capable of but that we're supposed to
>be in dialogue with.
>
>The US and Australia share a mythology of the frontier. In its US version
>white men came to a place so close to empty that the aboriginals count as a
>nuisance except when they're teachers, and anyway they never developed the
>place and needed to be displaced. This required strong men, whose job it
>was to civilize the land, and strong women, whose job it was to civilize
>the men. In the US, at any rate, this was always a myth. The men who first
>entered the various wildernesses tended to be incapable of social life. Few
>of them became civilized. They were simply displaced by families. Fennimore
>Cooper, who was a lot closer in time and place to the event, understood
>this: Natty Bumpo is as threatened by extinction as his Indian friends.
>
>The perpetuation of the myth has meant that large numbers of men in the US
>continue to spend a part of their emotional lives feeling deprived of a
>freedom that mostly existed among the marginal and in the penny-dreadfuls
>and the movies. Hence the western. Remarkably, the engines of entertainment
>have managed to impart this to recent immigrant groups. For myself as a
>child, I internalized two myths, the one that ran from slavery in Egypt to
>deprivation in Eastern Europe to the perilous ocean crossing and security
>in the US, and the one in which I rode alone into the unknown. I suspect
>that the latter has fueled my love of large empty spaces.
>
>I assume that the situation in Australia is similar. Crocodile Dundee is as
>good an escape fantasy as most westerns.
>
>Behind the fantasy is the mass of lives of quiet desperation, where the
>majority spend their working lives staring at Bartleby's blank wall and
>men, at any rate, often think that if not for the wife and children they
>could live lives of instinctual freedom. But that's I think changing, in
>the middle class at least. Increasingly men and women stare equally at the
>same wall, and the dream increasingly seems to be to escape together.
>Periodically there's a rash of articles about couples who chuck it all and
>start vinyards, or B&B's, or something that allows them a degree of
>flexibility. And the airwaves are filled with ads for young-looking couples
>in happy retirement. And in fact these days when I go into the big empty
>spaces I find couples or small groups of women carrying backpacks as often
>as I find groups of men or individual walkers.
>
>I divided my month in Australia between cities and outback. In Sydney I
>bunked with an ex-student and her apartment mate, two heterosexual women in
>their early 30s who were adventurous to a fault. I spent time with them and
>their friends of all genders, and I never saw my friends become passive in
>the face of male argument. And I got to hang out, there and in Melbourne,
>with women like Alison and Jill Jones, nobody's patsies. In most places I
>stayed in hostels or camped out, and I met lots of rugged young couples. I
>was struck by the independence of the women and the sweetness of the men. I
>saw no macho posturing. Very different from what I'd been given to expect.
>But of course it was only a month, and I can't claim a very deep knowledge.
>But I carry with me the memory of young couples on enormous cattle stations
>in the middle of the desert, the children of unpleasant men who probably
>came close to fitting thetraditional image, but who appeared nonetheless to
>treat each other as equals.
>
>I think I've wandered way off-point. I'm suggesting that there are a lot of
>McCauleys out there, in both countries, but that vulnerability to their
>appeal is fueled by old myths, and by current frustrations that have little
>to do with gender but get expressed through the available rhetoric of
>gender. That those who have a pretty tenuous hold on their impulses, and
>there are a lot of them, are sometimes motivated to violence by that
>rhetoric. And that for the majority of men, and probably women, there's a
>disconnect between the lives they actually,and willingly, lead, and the
>aspirations they have for those lives, and the kernel of the myth that they
>hold onto, because it's what's available to them, as an escape fantasy.
>
>It would be nice if the myth we carried within us were more communal and
>less solitary. Though that, too, has its dangers.
>
>Mark
>
>
>
>
>
>
>At 07:02 AM 1/29/2007, you wrote:
>>very nice piece alison - well said - and it is perfectly all right to use
>>me - typical impetuosity eh???
>>cheers - jen
>>
>>----Original Message Follows----
>>From: andrew burke <[log in to unmask]>
>>Reply-To: Poetryetc provides a venue for a dialogue relating to poetry and
>> poetics <[log in to unmask]>
>>To: [log in to unmask]
>>Subject: Re: Bad poetry, etc
>>Date: Mon, 29 Jan 2007 12:10:49 +0800
>>
>>Thanks, Alison. Well said.
>>
>>Andrew
>>http://hispirits.blogspot.com/
>>
>>On 29/01/07, Alison Croggon <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>>
>>>Thanks, Kaspar. Andrew, in the end, finding this whole thing was
>>>bothering me deeply, I posted a fairly extended response on
>>>Sarsaparilla, including some of the disucssion here -
>>>http://sarsaparillablog.net/?p=483 - no way am I entering the enemy's
>>>territory on this one.
>>>
>>>All the best
>>>
>>>Alison
>>>
>>
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