One could do a lot worse than Simic as the anointed one. I tend to like him
because the New Formalists made a fetish out of hating him. I don't think
it's true, Stephen, that the conservatives -- the real ones: Dana Gioia,
Mark Jarman, Paul Lake, etc. -- ever liked him. And the New Yorker, Mark,
for all its faults, has a cosmopolitan taste that the real nativists of
American poetry abominate. I'm just saying we should be clear who the real
bastards are. Back in the eighties, it was fashionable to criticize American
poets for writing poems that "sounded like translations" of Eastern European
poetry. If that was so & I don't think it was then American poetry is
stronger for having encountered Holub, Milosz, Rozewicz, Herbert & the great
Russian poets of the 20th century. And while Simic may be second-generation,
he still counts in my book. He's never written anything that approaches the
aesthetic dishonesty & intellectual vacuity of Donald Hall or Dana Gioia.
The cultural conservatives' thinly disguised contempt for Eastern European
writers was founded on an idiotic view of "American" literature as flowing
exclusively out of Whitman, the Transcendentalists, optimism & so on & one
in the spirit of exceptionalism.. Simic has written some lovely poems, for
which I am grateful.
jd
--
Joseph Duemer
Professor of Humanities
Clarkson University
[sharpsand.net]
|