Wicked Good Bloggings this Week 19

awake at dawn on someone's couch on Billy Collin's defense of his popularity

Tooting what he calls "the loud horn of the vernacular" is a reaction to the kind of poetry he says he was writing in college. "I was brought up on the Mount Rushmore of modern giants." Anyone who has slogged through the allusions in Ezra Pound's Cantos or puzzled over the tangled knots of meaning in a Wallace Stevens poem will sympathize.

"I committed those sins of obscurity myself," he says. "I bought the connection between difficulty and value that was involved in these very difficult poets."

"It took to my 30s to get rid of this."

     and their concern with its implications

Not the first time in the last few months that an author has stepped into the podium and spoken FOR a bastardized populist literary agenda, and against the perceived "difficulty" of reading outside of one's comfort zone. I can say I feel certain this is NOT a good thing.

But also, probably, not entirely on the shoulders of these authors. If one is attacked for one's simple, approachable writing (as a sign of intellectual or academic failing), perhaps it's forgiveable to do a little lashing-out in return.

Languagehat on John Ashberry's poem (included in posting) in the 3/25 NYRB:

That's what gets to us all, if we have any feel for the world outside ourselves. It drives our comics to unwonted seriousness (Lenny Bruce, Dick Gregory, even Woody Allen, unable quite to extricate himself from his Upper East Side solipsism but somehow aware that Ingmar Bergman had access to something he would like to have for himself), and it's driven Ashbery to communicate with a directness he once might have raised an eyebrow at, appropriating the gravity of a Sophocles to his own ends.

HG Poetics comments on poetics held my interest this week:

yes, the characteristic quality of poetry is its reflexivity (its way of being something rather than simply pointing to something); but the shortcoming of so much postmodern poetry is that it simply turns this into a dichotomy ("poetry must not be mimetic since it is reflexive, self-mirroring"). What happens then is it gets further and further from ordinary experience & feeling, accenting its function as intellectual game.

The real puzzle, it seems to me, is how poetry can be both mimetic & reflexive.

On a political satirical note, Healing Iraq on the misunderstood media, Al-Jazeera and Fox News:

Is it because of its self-describing motto which says 'Opinion, and the other opinion' which is never ever the case? Is it because it claims to be objective and unbiased when it clearly refers to thugs and criminals in Iraq as 'resistance fighters'?

Is it because of its self-describing motto which says 'Fair and Balanced' which is never ever the case? Is it because it claims to be objective and unbiased when it clearly refers to mercenaries in Iraq as 'contractors'?

American Digest on Thom Gunn as a teacher:

I remember the craggy, pitted face easily moved to laughter and a sensibility moved to kind despair when he was forced to experience a particularly bad line. I remember that the class was formed of about 12 students and that on any given day at least ten were baked to a crisp. But that didn’t mean Gunn didn’t get our attention. How could he not? He was not only an elegant poet, an inheritor of the Tennysonian tradition in English poetry, but he was an elegant man.

And thanks to a fool in the forest for some comic relief:

hahahahahaovoidshahahahaha