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Mike Snider's Formal Blog at the Sonnetarium
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Saturday, February 26, 2005 |
This morning I was catching up on some of the wonderful material referenced at Arts & Letters Daily: first, Dolan Cummings's piece from Spiked on institutional threats, especially from "ethics committees," to free speech within the academic world; then Brooke Allen in the Nation on "Our Godless Constitution"; and finally, from Andrew Sullivan, the gay Catholic neo-con Iraq-hawk who ended up endorsing John Kerry in the last election, an article in the Times (UK) online on the iPod nation (of which he and I are members):
You get your news from your favorite blogs, the ones that won't challenge your view of the world. You tune into a satellite radio service that also aims directly at a small market — for new age fanatics, liberal talk or Christian rock. Television is all cable. Culture is all subculture. Your cell phones can receive e-mail feeds of your favorite blogger's latest thoughts — seconds after he has posted them — get sports scores for your team or stock quotes of your portfolio.
Technology has given us a universe entirely for ourselves — where the serendipity of meeting a new stranger, hearing a piece of music we would never choose for ourselves or an opinion that might force us to change our mind about something are all effectively banished.
And then I remembered Cole Swensen's poems on baroque gardens, which, at the February Desert City reading, she described as being about "gardens and the military; control and nature; growth and precision." Now, I don't know Cole Swensen or her poetry, and I don't remember what she read well enough to characterize it in any way other than "enjoyable and interesting, but not what I'd like to write,"* so those remarks and poems are just a jumping-off place — nothing here should be considered a comment on her or her work or an imputation of any particular attitude on her part.
What I find interesting this Saturday afternoon is that there should be any mystery about gardens and the military or any of the rest of it. Artifices like gardens and poems are among the things people make as momentary stays against the evident indifference of the world. Who understands that indifference better than soldiers and statesmen? Who could be surprised that men and women who have trained for battle, and especially those who have experienced it, should sometimes find joy in order, decorum, and beauty? Or that powerful men and women should use their power to have gardens planted? — an expression of that power, of course, but also an opportunity of retreat from the necessity of its use.
I work on a Navy base. I'm married to a woman who was a sergeant in the army. Usually when I meet poets or academics (I was one of those once) in person those facts are no more an influence on their apparent attitudes towards me than say, the color of my shoes. When they seem to make any difference at all it is usually an increased fascination — but whether in any particular case it's from interest in an exotic or from Johnson's attitude toward women writers and dancing dogs I'm not so sure. Sometimes, in the online world of listserves and blogs, one hears intellectual nonsense about an adequate response to poetry (and gardens?) — not just to some particular poem — requiring serious study; very occasionally it becomes clear that there are people who regard soldiers as simple butchers — both attitudes are bigotry, though not to the same degree. The first and lesser bigotry is often reinforced in the narrow, academic, mostly self-styled avant garde world of poetry blogs, an instance of what Andrew Sullivan described.
*Chris Vitiello, the other reader that night, apparently paid attention better than I did.)
8:20:11 PM 
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Wednesday, February 23, 2005 |
Tomorrow I work nine hours and drive five, so have a good Thursday, everybody. You can slap me for today's post this weekend — or tomorrow, if you like — I just won't see it until Friday.
8:15:42 PM
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It's a shame Greg Perry doesn't hear Richard Wilbur's voice in his poems, but, hey, nobody's perfect, and in the course of wondering about it he gave me a potential clue to something that's been bothering me. Greg quotes Wilbur on Frost from this interview:
If you put enough stresses into a Robert Frost line to have it be a pentameter, then you're going to have to be making New England cadences. Now if someone attempts a poetry of distinctive speech rhythms without a metrical base, I think a good part of the intended emphasis is going to get away.
In an article in the archives (subscribe! $18 bucks a year!) at Contemporary Poetry Review, Justin Quinn laments that ethnic and cultural differences all melt into the generic multicultural poetry of identity poetics. The same seems to me to happen with translations — mostly from Spanish, since I read that fairly well, but also from languages I can barely puzzle through, such as Italian, Portuguese, and French, and even from Greek and other languages that are Greek to me — they all sound almost as if they'd been written by the same person; there's no clue beyond topical references that the original poems were written by members of some particular culture. There are some exceptions, mostly metrical: Rafael Campo's translations of Lorca's late sonnets sound like Lorca and are quintessentially Spanish in feeling; I'm not sure what 17th French sounded like, but Richard Wilbur's translations of classical French theater don't sound like Wilbur, and his Moliere sounds different from his Racine.
Each language, until recently, had its characteristic meter(s): Spanish endecasílabo, French syllabics, Greek quantities, English accentual-syllabics, and so on. In poets like Antonio Machado, Rubén Darío, Octavio Paz, and Pablo Neruda, who knew in their bones, even if they did not use those meters, it's easy to hear even in their shared language that Spain, Nicaragua, Mexico, and Chile were very different worlds. Now everyone is freed from such strictures, everyone sounds the same, and the original language, the place of birth, is a mere accident.
7:42:05 PM
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Via Jilly Dybka's Poetry Hut Blog, I've learned that Sena Naslund, director of the Creative Writing program at the University of Louisville, editor of the Louisville Review, and author of Ahab's Wife and Four Spirits, has been named Kentucky's Poet Laureate. I took Sena's CW courses, taught undergraduate CW under her direction, and worked with her as an associate editor of The Louisville Review. She brought such outstanding visiting poets to campus as Stephen Spender, Lewis Turco, Sonia Sanchez, Peter Cooley, and Maxine Kumin. She published my first poem in TLR before I knew her, while I was working as a tool-and-die-maker's apprentice at General Electric, and when I did know her she was always kind and supportive but honest in her work with me and others of her students. Kentucky's made a good coice.
5:55:40 PM
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Monday, February 21, 2005 |
Just how did I contrive
To spend this day this way —
Three hundred miles to drive
And all of them away.
11:23:11 AM
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Sunday, February 20, 2005 |
Deana and I attended two readings this weekend: in Raleigh, Stammer's Carolina Wren Press showcase at the Percolator Lounge, featuring E. V. Noechel, Andrea Selch, Jaki Shelton Green, and Joseph Donahue, and, in Chapel Hill, the Desert City Poetry Series at Internationalist Books, featuring Chris Vitiello and Cole Swensen, finalist for the 2004 National Book Award in poetry. Children and jobs meant we couldn't go to the after-reading reading by Evie Shockley, but we did meet her and a number of other delightful people at the pre-reading dinner. It's odd and disturbing how little contact there is between the Raleigh and Chapel Hill poetry scenes — Durhamites seem to show up everywhere and invite everyone. But we missed Durham3 because we were in Chapel Hill.
If you know me only from this blog and you know the work of the poets we heard, you'll probably be surprised to read that I enjoyed myself immensely almost all the time. In particular, I was impressed by Cole Swensen's reading of two series of poems, one about hands and one about the baroque gardener André Le Nôtre, by Andrea Selch's euphonics poems, by Chris Vitiello's starting sales pitch, and by Joseph Donahue's "failed haiku." E. V. Noechel's selections were mostly familiar to me and so made less of an impression, but I've always liked the ones I recognized. Auden teaches that none are unjustly remembered.
12:39:09 PM
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Tony Tost's Unquiet Grave and Aaron McCullough's Flowers that Glide, both entertaining and insightful blogs, have officially gone dark. I'll miss them. Marianne Shaneen, a less frequent poster, has posted nothing at Froth for nearly 4 months, so I'm assuming it's dark as well.
But I've added six new blogs, four from the Lucifer Poetics Group of which Tony Tost is a member. Those four first: the group blog Goat's Head Soup, Marcus Slease's Never mind the beasts, E. V. Noechel's Rats and Facts, Chris Vitiello's The delay, Robert Lane's Malleable Jangle, and Cecilia Woloch's Catching Up With Cecilia.
Update: Make that seven new blogs: Joseph Massey's Bacon Bargain.
10:55:26 AM
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Saturday, February 19, 2005 |
Poems aren't philosophy or science, but philosophy and science are things people do, and the doing both shapes and is part of "the feeling of living with other people in the world we're given." Wordsworth and Whitman, despite oppressively learned astronomers and murderous dissectors, both argued that poetry should have a role in humanizing the results of science. Doing so means presenting at least some of the kinds of material and argument that really are hard for people to grasp (a wonderful metaphor buried in that last phrase, repeated even in its latinate cousin to "apprehend"). When faced with these kinds of difficulties, instead of lamenting the self-referentiality of texts or the radical isolation of the constructed self, poets should listen to what scientists and those philosophers not infected with postmodern doubt (in philosophy departments Derrida's not generally taken seriously) have to say. Here's Richard Dawkins:
I think, let the science speak, because it's inherently fascinating. That's one piece of advice. The second, separate piece is try to put yourself—it's so obvious, I mean it doesn't need saying—in the position of the reader. Not just one reader, but, successively, lots of different readers. Imagine this was being read by Uncle Joe, imagine this was being read by your doctor, imagine this was being read by your lawyer, imagine this was being read by your old French teacher. So every time you read through your stuff, imagine it through the eyes of some particular individual, and it will have an automatic sort of Darwinian selection effect on your words, and you'll recognize—"Oh, he wouldn't have understood that, she wouldn't have got that point," and so you change it. And by the time a chapter has been through this succession of filters, it comes out clearer, because you've anticipated all the difficulties that people will have.
That sounds a lot like the advice we give freshman comp students. Why shouldn't it apply to us, as poets? We certainly must assume intelligence and motivation on the part of our readers, but readers don't and can't share, in detail, our thoughts and feelings and experience, and, if they did, why would they need to read what we have to say?
I've been struggling with just this issue in my sonnet "Sleepless after Ovid." I've posted briefly about it here, the whole year-long wrestle is here, and here's the poem as it stands now:
Sleepless After Ovid
The moon, days from the full, slips off the sky
Behind me while the sun's still at my feet,
And for a time that famous crowd swings high,
So clear and bright — no sight so darkly sweet,
Or strangely dark. There reels Callisto, raped
And spurned and murdered, never let to rest;
Andromeda's still chained; there's Cygnus shaped
Into a swan to end that hopeless quest.
It's colder when the heavens clear at night,
But not so cruel as it clearly seemed
In the grip of gods two thousand years ago —
For blessedly, they're gone, and now we know
The stars are suns, far older than he dreamed,
Though still too young to flood the sky with light.
There's some surface difficulty: Just who is Ovid, and Callisto, and maybe especially Cygnus, and what crowd is it that's famous? Will a person who knows the Metamorphoses know that waxing moons first appear in the sky around sunset, when they are also setting, and that each night they set a little later, so that in the fall, as the nights grow longer than the days, a moon already full enough to obscure with its light the fainter stars will still set some hours before sunrise, leaving, among others and in the northern hemisphere, these particular constellations easily visible? (Will anyone be able to navigate that last sentence?) How many people will recognize the poem to be a Petrarchan/Shakespearean hybrid with Sicilian instead of Italian quatrains in the octave and, even though not marked by rhyme, a switch in thought in the last two lines? How much does it add to know those kinds of technical details or detract to not know them?
Although I can't know whether the poem will motivate readers to try, most, if not all, of the difficulties mentioned above can be resolved with a dictionary or else don't really matter to the argument of the poem. The last pair of lines is a different matter. How many people have realized that the darkness of the night sky is something of a puzzle? (read Darkness at Night.) A dark night sky means that the universe is not infinitely old nor infinitely large, because in either case the light of distant stars would make the night's sky as bright as the day's; they would be, in fact, indistinguishable, and our kind of life would be impossible. So the very fact that we can see the constellations which Ovid wrongly attributed to vengeful and jealous gods places our experience in a world where time matters, and for other reasons we know that time is on a scale nearly unimaginable both before and after we have anything to do with it. We don't matter in such a universe, but it's better than being at the mercy of any god.
I have serious doubts about whether the poem is successful in conveying all that. At Eratosphere, Tim Murphy (a marvelous poet: books here, here, and here) told me the ideas just aren't sonnet-shaped. Maybe not.
10:32:08 AM
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Friday, February 18, 2005 |
The two most certain ways to bore someone are to present nothing unknown and to present nothing connected with what is known. (Nodding yet? Which nod?) It starts early: babies a few hours old stare longer at patterns with variations than at either unpatterned imagery or at patterned imagery which doesn't change. Between the two extremes the appropriate balance of novelty and familiarity to necessary engage an audience can vary wildly with the difficulty or strangeness of the new material and with the intelligence, motivation. Sometimes difficulty is, for animals like us, inherent in the material. We are not, for instance, good at applying statistical data, and so we feel safer driving on I-95 (as long as we're the ones doing the driving) than we do riding in an airliner, and we continue to vote for public policies which discourage the building of nuclear power plants.
Difficulty in poetry is not of that kind, for we are marvelously good at the subject matter of poetry, which is the subject matter of all imaginative literature: the feeling of living with other people in the world we're given. Nor is there anything else so reliably and endlessly fascinating to us — but how can that be, given that we are so good at understanding the subject and that we're easily bored by what isn't newish? The obvious but less important reason is that the world we're given is constantly changing at every level of organization and experience, from new and lost people to aging and changing bodies to new political arrangements to new technologies. The more important reason is that we and our relations to other people and the nonhuman world are so vastly complicated and various that, as good as we are even as infants and as incredibly sophisticated as we become growing into adulthood, no human being can experience even a fraction of the possibilities.
Stories teach us how to live, and even the purest lyric poem is a moment in a story. There is wisdom in the injunction to delight and instruct, and the traditional techniques of poetry, including especially meter, can help make a story more memorable and affecting, but I'm most emphatically not saying that poetry and plays and novels should be written to "teach a lesson." A well-made story or poem is a report of an expedition into uncertain territory, and readers will know immediately if a writer hasn't taken an honest look around. And while it's true that even beautiful and profoundly moving stories can be pernicious — the Bible and the Koran come to mind — Adorno's famous claim that "writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric" is cowardly and dangerous. Jaques Barzun, in From Dawn to Decadence, noted that the turn from literary values in the writing of history resulted in "leaving the glib popularizer a free field"; on a listserve I subscribe to someone recently wrote that poetry had moved on, and now we have country music if you want rhyme and meter. Well, people do want rhyme and meter and story and character. Who do you want to give it to them?
2:10:58 PM
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Wednesday, February 16, 2005 |
Every time I start a post on the Dangers of PoMo Theory, I mean to say something about how I got started at all, and since I haven't yet, I'll do it tonight when I don't really have time to finish my argument anyway. Hang coherence! I'm not sure I'm ever really coherent. So, Jonathan Mayhew, in a multi-blog discussion of a Bruce Andrews poem from BAP which I despise and he likes only a little, had this to say:
"Sure, when I serenaded some construction workers this afternoon with it, they weren't too appreciative. ... Maybe you need a teeny bit of context to understand what this kind of writing is trying to do. Context that a critic might provide, that being the critic's job."
Then, a week or so later, Daniel Green wrote Spontaneously Attuned to the Text in response to a post at Charlotte Street (must add to blogroll). Daniel Green's post ends "If literature and literary criticism could be wrested from the institutional hands of the academy, literary theory as it is presently known would be dead." Now, that's not really a fair summary of the post, and he claims to have "made extensive use of the work of Derrida," but, combined with Jonathan's remarks, it got me thinking about just how disastrous it is that most American poetry is now being written by people who make their living in the academic world. And it's not because of writing workshops or cronyism — it's because, too often, talk about poetry in the abstract, about the discourse of poetry or the social role of poetry or the whatever of poetry take precedence over reading and thinking about poems, so much so that we've reach the absurd state where, according to Jonathan's report of Marjorie Perloff's account, there are PhD candidates in English at Stanford who have never read "Ode on a Grecian Urn."
I promise I'll be done with this before the week's out.
7:27:52 PM
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Monday, February 14, 2005 |
I almost didn't get a Valentine's poem finished for my sweetie, and that's way more important than my ideas about postmodern literary theory. And besides, this piece I found via Jilly Dybka's Poetry Hut Blog says about everything without no stinking evo-psycho. I love this: "Kipling, though less intelligent than [Henry] James, is a greater writer — at any rate, a writer more interested in capturing externals by means of words."
8:55:53 PM
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I don't visit This Public Address as often as I should. Right now there are three short pieces on Yeats, Blake, Milton, and the work of writing (in chronological order, here, here, and here) and a meditation on surgery, pointed with a quote from "Tintern Abbey."
Posted from webmail, so there's no title.
2:22:01 PM
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Sunday, February 13, 2005 |
I'm a little surprised (and more than a little pleased) that no one objected to my characterization of the core tenets of postmodern theory. Perhaps it was because I said they began in uncontroversial claims about the limitations of our experience, and no one noticed — or I didn't make forcefully enough — my claim that postmodern claims about language are not so uncontroversial. I'm more than a little surprised that no one objected when I said the reason the core claims are mainly uncontroversial is that they're nothing new, nothing that isn't in the pre-Socratics, the Book of Job, and the Bhagavad Gita: "All is clouded by desire, Arjuna, as fire by smoke, as a mirror by dust …"
I also more than hinted last time that my objections to the language claims of postmodernist theory are rooted in current work in the cognitive sciences, including evolutionary psychology, suggesting that we're probably at least as good at being human beings as tapeworms are at being tapeworms. I'm in no way an expert in those fields, so my understanding could be wildly misguided*, and I encourage everyone to read Daniel Dennett, George Lakoff, Mark Turner, Giles Fauconnier, Mark Johnson, Antonio Damasio, Eve Sweetser, Marc Hauser, Karl Sigmund, Helena Cronin, William Calvin, Steven Pinker, Stanislas Dehaene, Judith Harris, Daniel Gilbert, Irene Pepperberg, and almost anyone mentioned in the indices to their books. There is a pretty generous sample of more casual work by several of these people here. All of them, unlike some writers I might mention, work hard to make their difficult and often unsettling ideas understood.
Here are those language claims I listed, reordered so I can make a more coherent argument:
- Much of our mental world is pre-verbal and therefore cannot be expressed by or even known to the language-using parts of our selves.
- Metaphor is distortion.
- Narrative is necessarily selective and always biased.
- Merely making statements about the world creates a false sense of understanding.
- Systematic disruption of ordinary language can provide access to deeper truths by clearing away the fog of false consciousness.
- Literary "texts" (the scare quotes are deliberate) are more about their internal structures and their relationship to other "texts" than to the world, and in any case the meanings readers will make of the experience [of reading] are more significant because more present in the [act of] reading than are the intentions of the author.
There's more to postmodern language theory than that, of course, but this is a blog and not a dissertation and no one objected the first time (no fair wanting more now). I'll begin by admitting the truth of the first three and show why they do not imply the fourth, at least, not in a way that matters.
A mind is a product of a brain in a body. As far as we know, no other species has a mind in the full sense which we can apply to human minds, but the human mind did not appear out of nothing. It is a product of evolution just as is our upright posture and the tongue of an anteater. In our close relatives and beyond there are antecedents and analogues to nearly every function of our minds: the auto-biographical self is, perhaps, the only real innovation. Even that may be based on an ability to string together, in a narrative, a history of at least a class of previous mental states (those which are the mind's report on the condition of the body in the world) and to use that history to project and evaluate possible future mental states.
For us and for all living things, it is important to adjust our internal and external activity to events outside and inside our bodies. In many animals, brains are an important means of organizing the proper homeostatic reactions: look for food when blood sugars are low; run like hell or hide when a predator appears; sleep when, for whatever mysterious reason, it is necessary; copulate when appropriate and possible. There is no detail-to-detail mapping from the world to an animal's sense of it, but rather an appropriate correspondence, appropriately organized. Minds extend that organization to possible states.
And they'd better be pretty damned good at it, because the kind of brain which can produce a mind in a body like ours is expensive. It needs a lot of sugar and oxygen; its sheer size imposes costs in infant mortality; its organization through experience means a long period of utter helplessness and a longer period of dependency on adults. We wouldn't be here if our minds didn't map well enough (the map is not the territory) that part of the world which matters to our survival — and what part of the world matters more to our survival than other people?
Language, of course, is the pre-eminent mental tool for dealing with other people. It is also a product of evolution, and its deep structures are shared by speakers of every human language because they are made possible by brain structures shared by every normal human being. No one has discovered a specific brain structure devoted to them (nor is it likely to happen, for many reasons), but Lakoff and Johnson (here and here), Turner (here), and others have shown that, far from their being problematic, language and most kinds of thought are impossible without metaphor and narrative.
Of course they can be used to deceive, coerce, and oppress, but no thoughtful response to those evils is possible without them, and it is only through them that we can even recognize such things as evil. They are part of our evolutionary heritage and they are at the heart of the tools we have for dealing with evil and for the expansion of human freedom. To abjure them because they are imperfect is no different from deliberate self-blinding because of optical illusions.
Well, I'm not quite done, but I'm done tonight.
*Please do write, by email or in a comment to this post, to let me know of any gross inaccuracies in my understanding or to point me to further source material for an intelligent non-specialist — but I'm not interested in and will delete without replying any emails or comments which advocate any variant of creationism, including so-called Intelligent Design. I'll be only slightly more tolerant of messages which maintain the essential separation of mind and body.
7:11:38 PM
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Saturday, February 12, 2005 |
The touring version of North Carolina's Lucifer Poetics Group consists of Chris Vitiello, E. V. Noechel, Brian Howe, Tony Tost, Randall Williams, Tessa Joseph, Todd Sandvik, Marcus Slease, and founder Ken Rumble. Last night I saw them read at the Flea, a rundown two-story frame former dentist's office improbably located in the DC suburb Friendship Heights. It was a wonderful evening, though too long for an old man — I didn't get back to my apartment until 3 in the morning, and I've slept most of the day today. I took pics after I remembered I had my Palm Zire with me, and they're here. Details tomorrow soon (I recorded everyone but Chris Vitiello, and I thought I was recording him), along with the finish of The Horrors of Theory.
8:11:42 PM
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Thursday, February 10, 2005 |
Over on the left, John Litzenberg has left his own sonnetarium and become a RadicalDruid, and Tim Yu and David Hess are both back at their blogs. Apparently Heathens in Heat has been back in business for a while and I've just been oblivious. David, I'm not Santa Claus, but I am keeping a list. There are some new blogs as well (new to me, anyway): Jake Adam York's Thicket, stella's mami's swisslovebaby, and Reyes Cardenas's Alivianate El Coco.
Thanks to Elieen Tabios for mentioning my chap, 44 Sonnets.
I'll be back Saturday.
8:18:47 PM
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Tuesday, February 8, 2005 |
The creek's done riz, and it will be Saturday before I can finish my little tirade and exhortation. In the meantime, one from Charles Martin's Starting from Sleep (info and other poems here and here):
STILL LIFE WITH PEARS
Hers:
She turns from it and it begins to dry,
An oilslick tightening into the fable
Of a slowing ripening mutuality:
Two pears at rest on the edge of a table.
His:
He wonders whether it could be the same
As it had been—or was that too a fiction?
He wonders whether this one has a name.
The third pear is already out of the picture.
Another's:
"He brought it from—I don't remember who.
For months he tried to find a buyer:
I told him either it goes or I do."
Mine:
"Yes, in a dumpster! Poor bedraggled pup!
Would you mind holding it a little higher?
Don't you just love it? Is it right side up?"
8:00:36 PM
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In last night's post, the sentence beginning
I don't really believe an entire intellectual program cannot be vitiated …
should actually begin
I don't really believe an entire intellectual program can be vitiated …
I really was tired.
8:46:23 AM
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Monday, February 7, 2005 |
Last night I asked three questions and offered an answer to the second: why don't poets just ignore theory, especially postmodern theory? After not riding a bicycle for nearly two months, I rode 35 miles today, so I don't know how long I'll last, but tonight I'll try get through at least the first question, restated as "Just what is wrong with postmodern literary theory?" After all, I myself said that the basic insights are completely noncontroversial, and I don't really believe an entire intellectual program cannot be vitiated by a clever hoax — though it sure was fun to watch.
I'll start with just why those basic insights concerning language and experience are so uncontroversial: there's nothing new there, except a radical sense of alarm: what is it but Plato's cave? Did devout Christians or Jews or Moslems or Buddhists or Hindus believe they could plumb the infinite mind of deity? Could the most radical positivists ignore Hume's devastating attack on induction? What is the scientific method but an institutionalized defense against personal and cultural bias, a rigorous attempt to embrace the notion that it's possible to be wrong?
I can't explain why it suddenly seemed so urgent to some twentieth century writers. Perhaps it was that, for a few years in WWI, for the first time in nearly a century, the rate of deaths by violence approached pre-modern magnitudes. Perhaps it was the Holocaust, or the 30-year-long threat of nuclear annihilation.
I do know that, for the first time since we stopped thinking ourselves to be the favorites or the image of some god, there is substantial reason to believe that, flawed as we are, as incomplete as our understanding necessarily is, we are also necessarily damned good at figuring out those parts of the world, including other people, which can contribute to or detract from our well-being — in the fullest sense of that idea. We, our minds and languages, are the products of four-and-a-half billion years of evolution. So are tapeworms. And tapeworms are really good at being tapeworms.
I meant to do more tonight, but I am just exhausted. Thanks to Josh Corey for his considered response to last night's post. I will get to his points before I'm done with this.
9:04:48 PM
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Many thanks to Ivy Alvarez for her comments on my 44 Sonnets, which is available for trade or $3, incuding postage. Hell, if you're a slave to pomo madness, I'll send it to you for the asking — no cheating, ok? And be sure to get a copy of what's wrong from Ivy while you're in the poem-buying mood. Only 7 days left for US money!
7:37:44 PM
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Hey, I'm all for close readings of the Pisan Cantos. The thing is, once you've entered a doctoral program, no one who matters to your career will want to read it unless it's informed by some meta-literary construction. About that I'm less sanguine.
12:01:13 PM
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Sunday, February 6, 2005 |
I've made another version of "Sleepless after Ovid," the poem I posted Friday and revised yesterday — you can find that newest version, preceded by its history since I started it last January, at the end of this post at the Draft House. Yesterday's version is included (in excellent company!) in the second Carnival of the Godless, hosted by PZ Myers at his wonderful biology and politics blog Pharyngula.
7:44:10 PM
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Critical reviewers are absolutely necessary. There are so many new poems, movies, readings, quintets, novels, plays, trios, stories, TV shows, paintings, slams, concertos, recordings, installations, bands, sculptures, performance pieces, drawings, and everything else that no one can experience even a significant fraction of the artistic deluge, and we must make our choices with whatever help we can find — but we won't find it in theory. Neither Kant nor Derrida can help us decide whether it's Dana Gioia or Ron Silliman who is worth our time and money. But if theory is merely useless to art's audience, it can be death to art. Especially in its postmodern varieties, it is a quicksand, a whirlpool, an addictive drug. To the extent a work of art requires theoretical explication, that work has failed. To the extent a work of art based in theory succeeds beyond providing grist for | |
