Sherry Chandler

Camille Paglia

has joined Dana Gioia in accusing contemporary American poetry of navel-gazing its way to irrelevence. The UK’s Telegraph offers an edited version of the introduction to Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-Three of the World’s Best Poems (Pantheon Books ), “line-by-line close readings of 43 poems, from canonical Renaissance verse to Joni Mitchell’s Woodstock:”

My attraction to poetry has always been driven by my love of English, which my family acquired relatively recently. (My mother and all four of my grandparents were born in Italy.) … What fascinated me about English was what I later recognised as its hybrid etymology: blunt Anglo-Saxon concreteness, sleek Norman French urbanity, and polysyllabic Greco-Roman abstraction. The clash of these elements, as competitive as Italian dialects, is invigorating, richly entertaining and often funny, as it is to Shakespeare, who gets tremendous effects out of their interplay. The dazzling multiplicity of sounds and word choices in English makes it brilliantly suited to be a language of poetry.

So far, so good. But Paglia says we blew it sometime after Woodstock. “Poetry was at a height of prestige in the 1960s,” she says, but:

My attentiveness to the American vernacular - through commercials, screwball comedies, hit songs, and talk radio (which I listen to around the clock) - has made me restive with the current state of poetry. I find too much work by the most acclaimed poets laboured, affected and verbose, intended not to communicate with the general audience but to impress their fellow poets. Poetic language has become stale and derivative, even when it makes all-too-familiar avant garde or ethnic gestures.

Oh my soul and whiskers. If Rush Limbaugh is the voice of authentic American vernacular, I need to start checking the classifieds for an ivory tower. (What’s with that “laboured,” I wonder. Just a transcription glitch in a British newspaper?)

I don’t have a dog in this town-gown fight. I’m probably stuck in that 1960s time warp with Paglia, though I always preferred the dark and crytpic “All Along the Watchtower” to “Woodstock.” (There I am in that ivory tower again.) The rhetoric of the article/introduction is dazzling but I’ll admit I got bored about halfway down and started skimming. That could be the effect of electronic text – the print in the article is small and I find backlit text hard to read. (So why did I start a blog? Good question.) But I never did like to be preached at, which is why I stopped going to church as soon as the choice was my own to make. I don’t attend the church of the great poets much, either, or read many anthologies. (I would like to read Paglia’s Table of Contents, to satisfy my curiosity – what “canonical Renaissance verse” does she pick to go with “Woodstock?” Most probably the canon himself – John Donne, from whose “Holy Sonnet XIV” the title is derived. But that still leaves 41 greatest hits. And what does John Donne have to do with the state of American poetry? And what poet was more studied and nonvernacular than Donne?)

Here in blogland among the jokers and the thieves, heretics all, you’ll find a brilliant deconstruction of Camille and the “sultry” M&M peanut of 1950s advertising fame at Poesy Galore, along with these relevent comments:

I haven’t been able to track down a list of the 43 poems Break, Blow, Burn covers. I’m a bit disappointed in advance knowing that there are many contemporary poems out there Paglia might dig but may not have looked hard enough for. She’s so turned off by the “pretentious theory” that has “kidnapped” poetry that I fear she may not have found the post-1960s poets she’d admire. How could she not give a snap to Denise Duhamel’s Maidenform bra? Would she really find nothing to like in Anne Carson?

Possibly related posts:

A solace of ripe plums

A Conversation with John Ashbery

Everybody’s a critic

Who is John Ashbery?

Something to ponder

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