A few years ago, Michael Macrone put out a book called "Brush Up Your Poetry." He took famous poems and wrote a bit about the author and a bit about the poem. The book was meant to spur the reading of poetry. It's a pretty good book.
Now, Camille Paglia has followed suit with her new book, "Break, Blow, Burn." Paglia does a good job of explicating poems. I don't always agree with her, but she has a nice selection in "Break, Blow, Burn" from Shakespeare on up to contemporary poets.
I was fourteen years younger when I read Paglia's Sexual Personae, and perhaps not as jaded as I am now. I was truly amazed then that anyone could know so much about such a wide range of history and art, religion and philosophy, politics and psychology. Today, when I read Paglia taking apart William Carlos Williams' "Red Wheel Barrow" and "This is Just to Say" in "Break, Blow, Burn," making them out to be deeply symbolic poems about the state of the world, and the state of Man and Woman... I'm unconvinced. I find both poems to be jokes on the public and symbolic of the reason so many people have turned away from poetry. Each poem can be made to mean anything, thus each poem means absolutely nothing. This isn't to diss Williams, but rather the group-think, self-serving editors who would publish and tout such poems as meaningful.
On the other hand, Paglia does a fine job with Shakespeare and other, more decent, poetry.
Wednesday, April 20, 2005
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8 comments:
Dear Sparrow,
Thank you for this review. I deeply admire the breadth of Camille Paglia's knowledge and interest even as I deplore some of her opinions and stances. I love the way she expresses herself.
As a disciple of Harold Bloom, I suspect that what you encounter in her reading of Williams is what Bloom refers to as "works of literature reading us." Thus Camille reads the poem and in explicating it tells us more about herself than about the poem. Thus, it sounds utterly fascinating to me.
Thanks for this review.
shalom,
Steven
Dear Wren,
This is just to say
I have deleted
your comment
regarding
the red wheelbarrow
and which
I found quite funny
but
broke rule #4
Forgive me
I will link here
to the Williams
reviews.
Ha! Well done, Falcon. And you're right, my comment was on the snarky side.
"Break, Blow, Burn" Sparrow, is (I assume) from the John Donne Holy Sonnet XIV (speaking of Baroque) where he compares God winning his soul to the rape of a virgin. Just like Paglia to chose that for a title. :)
Batter my heart, three-personed God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I'll have to read up on Bloom, Steven. I have a gap there. He sure sounds right about literature "reading us."
You know, though, I like haiku and cinquain -- but I don't like "red wheelbarrow" or "this is just to say" at all.
There was a poetry movement back around that time called "Spectre Poetry." It was really hot and all the magazines were taking Spectre poetry to publish. It turned out to be a hoax started by Witter Bynner and another poet friend of Millay's who's name escapes me... they were just riffing on the imagists, writing poetry that meant nothing and trading on their famous names to publish gibberish as a joke on editors.
And the editors never forgave them.
Thanks, Steven.
And, yeah, Wren, the title is Donne.
Cute, Falcon.
Dear Wren,
It's odd. I didn't use to like either of the two poems you mentioned, but as I age, I see the joke and enjoy it a great deal more. I suspect that given enough time and distance they will recede into the background, but if not, they present a certain beautiful strain of the ordinary. I don't consider them deeply meaningful, the way others would like me to--they are not, for example "Sunday Morning" or "The Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock," but there is a certain charming quirkiness about them that jolts along and suggested a new way.
I too like haiku and other short forms, and I grow to like things I never thought much of before. Perhaps it is waning of critical faculties, or perhaps it is chaning vision that results from approaching Williams's age and beginning to see more what he might have been about.
However, I do think you might have a point when you suggest that his path may have entailed a certain derailing. It's one of the reasons I like Dana Gioia as much as I do--there is a return there to classical forms and an insistence that they still work. They do--you all are showing that.
shalom,
Steven
I loved Gioia's "Can Poetry Matter." My better half bought me his new book, "Disappearing Ink: Poetry at the end of the print culture" for Christmas but I haven't started it yet.
How can I wait with a title like that? Well, the whole RCIA Easter Vigil thingie made me forget I had it. :)
The Spectra Hoax was in 1916, Wren, and I think the Red Wheelbarrow was in 1923. Bynner's friend was Arthur Ficke who wrote some quite decent sonnets back and forth with Millay.
Bynner, Ficke and others (including your man, Edwin Arlington Robinson) wrote nonsense poems under pseudonyms, published a small book of Spectra poetry to raves, and continued to send silly poems in to publishers -- all because of the nonsense they saw being published by the imagists like WCW. Editors loved the stuff... You're right, once it all came out they were all lucky to ever be published again.
Here's Ficke writing as Anne Knish:
Her soul was freckled
Like the bald head
Of a jaundiced Jewish banker.
Her fair and featurous face
Writhed like
An albino boa-constrictor.
She thought she resembled the Mona Lisa.
This demonstrates the futility of thinking.
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