Displacing the Big Chip on My Shoulder
I should be careful. The majority of my posts this week might give the impression I'm a bitter troll. I used to be bitter, but I mellowed after 30. I'm still a troll.
I'm having an e-mail conversation with my friend Laura (someone I met during the height of my bitter troll years at AOL) about how does one find the "best" poetry being written today, the stuff that people will be reading 100, 200 years from now. She wants to know right now who the 21st century Shakespeare or Dante will be. My point was that we'll be hard pressed to figure out what future generations will find valuable and important so why not just read what is valuable and important to us now. But Laura is interested and often bemoans the current state of poetry. I find nothing to bemoan. There's lot of stuff out there I don't like, but there's so much that I do and I'm always finding new poets I really dig that sometimes I'm overwhelmed. Laura doesn't have this problem. She says she finds plenty of "good" poems, but very little that wows her. The poems she finds that she considers "amazing" are from translations of non-English writing poets, especially poets from Poland. I've made suggestions, but our tastes are quite different and I don't think I'm that helpful. She wants poems that are "deeply true and universal."
Any suggestions?
Frankly I like poems that lie their asses off.
posted by RL @ 2:41 PM
4 comments
4 Comments:
Is Laura a poet? An academic?
I find that the more "academic" I become, the less interested I am in "great" literature. As one of my brighter students put it the other day, "there are a lot of good books."
I think it's slightly arrogant to assume that we can predict "greatness." Look at literary history--it's never worked the way Laura assumes that it works. Canons are made after the fact for a lot of interesting reasons, most of which have little to do with literature.
Finally, if we rarefy art, if we put all that is "great" on a pedestal, we keep it out of the hands of a lot of people who can really use it, whose lives can be affected by it. So I say more poems more poems more poems. Let future literary historians and cultural studiers decide what's great. Let's the rest of us read and write poems.
I asked her what she considered herself and she plead the fifth (she says for the purposes of this discussion she's "a person who wants to read incredibly good poems"). She has a masters degree in Russian literature, writes poetry as well as news articles on an unrelated subject.
To Laura, I respectfully submit: read great poems! No one is stopping you!
first, don't expect there to be a lot of great poetry written today. there wasn't in 1600, arguably the zenith of poetry in English for all time.
a good poem is worth rereading once, perhaps. a great poem demands that you return to it over & over throughout a lifetime, because everytime it's different & so are you.
ignore the blurbs. they lie as much as campaign ads--which in fact they are.
reputations are a measure of who is the better publicist--an interesting talent, but the wrong kind.
be especially interested in people who are disliked. that often means they are on to something.
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