Agreed.

But Wright never did much for me.

Which I think gets us back to another way this thread could have 
gone. Artists in whatever medium tend not to make (or even try to 
make) objective judgments about work in their medium. I have a 
painter friend who almost foams at the mouth at the mention of 
Picasso, and a composer friend who used to rant at great length about 
Brahms. It's usually a matter of what one finds useful for one's own 
evolving practice, and that changes over time. So the ground is 
littered with the once-useful. As an adolescent I was immersed in 
Sandburg and Patchen and flirted with Vachel Lindsay. I have no 
desire to revisit any of them. But they helped get me started.

There's also the sense of membership in the same discussion, which 
tends to be more forgiving. At a point when I was still teaching I 
thought I'd used up WCW. I had been reading Asphodel aloud to 
students almost every year. But he remained part of the silent gang 
in my head. Which made it easy to revisit and learn from what my 
practice hadn't prepared me to notice before.

It would be interesting to hear about who else got dropped along the 
way by various of us. With the caveat that what I, for instance, find 
useless or no longer useful will almost certainly be 
defend-to-the-death important to someone else on the list's practice.

I suddenly feel a need to reread Moby Dick. Maybe it's the blustery 
weather. Which suggests another desideratum. I'm over twice the age 
Melville was when he wrote his blasphemous book, but it remains 
ageless. I couldn't read Billy Budd until I was past forty--made no 
sense to me, seemed pure loss of the fires of Moby Dick--but then it 
became, and remains for me, one of the wisest of books. Likewise 
Joyce's "The Dead," tjhough he was a young man when he wrote it. 
There are others that I once loved that seem merely childish now. It 
would be a purgatory to have to read Portrait of the Artist now, for 
instance. Which is to say that I'm no longer a member of the right 
demographic.

Mark

At 04:58 PM 10/26/2007, you wrote:
>Mark, the intentional fallacy, though, still leaves us to evaluate the
>language of the poem. I don't know what was in Wright's mind when he had the
>experience that led to the poem, or when he wrote the poem. He may have been
>entirely sincere -- that word again! -- but the language leaves me, as a
>reader, feeling that I have been asked to fork over a sirloin price for a
>chicken salad sandwich.As Walter Mondale asked (quoting a TV commercial),
>"Where's the beef?"
>
>jd
>
>On 10/26/07, Max Richards <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> >
> > Those were the days.
> >
> > [As a teenage lad circa 1950 I hadn't even found historical Art,
> > just the Sydney tabloid 'Man magazine' furtively seen while I waited for
> > my
> > haircut,
> > and ads for ladies' underwear in the Auckland daily paper.
> >
> > I remember trying (unschooled watercolourist) to turn some of these images
> > into my own erotic art works - discreet by any standards out of ignorance.
> >
> > Then there was a dim saucy periodical from England called 'Lilliput', with
> > a
> > couple of shadowy nude photos in each number.
> >
> > At the movies I fancied Jean Simmons.]
> >
> > Max
> >
> > On 27/10/07 5:55 AM, "Mark Weiss" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> >   And the pre-Raphaelites,
> > > given our shared fascination with red-haired
> > > women, were sometimes the nearest thing to
> > > pornography available to me in those days, tho
> > > considerably less honest than pornographers tend to be.
> > >
> > > Mark
> >
> >
>
>
>--
>Joseph Duemer
>Professor of Humanities
>Clarkson University
>[sharpsand.net]