Speaking of sermons, I pulled a Munch a couple of days ago on Eric Ormsby's state of poetry piece in the New Criterion. Mike Snider commented yesterday on Poetry's editor Christian Wiman's comments on the
dire condition of both poetry and our culture at large, about whether poetry can survive in the image-ridden, short-attention span mess television has made of our world. It's a version of the argument recently made by Camille Paglia, and supposedly leant some scientific rigor by this study, in which five questions on a survey diagnose attention problems. I'm not impressed by any of it.Me neither (it's ironic that Wiman is concerned that "the great bulk of our experience... come from the top down. It is institutionalized, generic, and monolithic." and then seems to be searching in the heavens for that "great poet--to shock us out of the bad habits.") But I was impressed with one thing concerning Hank Lazer's opinings on the state of the art in Boston Review:
The critics have a point. Contemporary American poetry is atomized, decentralized, and multi-faceted, and the range of poetries and audiences is too varied to capture in a compact or singular history. It is difficult to know exactly what’s going on now in American poetry. But maybe this dispersion, this so-called loss of direction is a good thing. Perhaps, contrary to the laments, we are now living through a particularly rich time in American poetry—an era of radically democratized poetry.I may not agree with any of the selections he praises, but that's his point (and prerogative) after all. It's the same point people make when extolling the democratizing influences of the internet. And since I happen to be participating in that effort by blogging this in the first place, I think he's onto something. This optimism may be a result of my recent self-induced purging due to that Ormsby horror, but I hope not. Go in peace.
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