Blog408

Blog408 Daily Notes on Poetry & Related Matters

15 March 2005: Here's a thread I posted to this morning:

Subject: Ambition & Greatness

Adam Kirsch, Daisy Fried, Thomas Sayers Ellis, and Jeredith Merrin take a few whacks at Big Questions in a brief symposium on poetic ambition & greatness in the March issue of *Poetry* (which is here. Suitably inconclusive, occasionally cranky, and well worth reading--

--David Graham

I found it just the sort of trivial crap one would expect from people connected to poetry magazine and not worth reading.

--Bob G.

Why, Bob?

--Dan Zimmerman

The subject is a yawn, the "ideas" put forth cliched and incredibly constricted. No real attempt to define terms. The word-to-thought ratio is high. Plus the fact that the people involved struck me (yes, subjectively) as being near-maximally distant from any internal knowledge of what greatness by any definition would be. Sheep discussing whether wanting to be a lion is a good thing or not.

Now tell me, Dan, why you didn't ask David why he thought the article worth reading? Why are hostile critics so much more often asked to defend their positions than friendly ones?

My opinion would have been shorter: no one who is not insanely driven by, among other things, an aim to be a great poet, by which I mean simply a poet who composes poetry as lasting as, say, Milton's, will ever compose an important body of work. I would not deny such persons their fun, and would certainly agree that sometimes they can produce nice work, perhaps even one or two lasting pieces, but they won't do more. This is not to say that a great poet must always struggle to produce great work, or that anyone who does that will produce great work, as I should not have to say.

As I reflected while writing the above on Poetry, a chief enemy of poetry, in my view, I thought of a valuable way it could use the money it was given a few years ago to actually help poets: pay its poetry-screeners something to tell each rejected submitter why his poems were rejected, with a close reading and critique of one rejected poem. To keep from getting even more swamped with submissions than it does now, it could limit the personal rejection letters to one to a submitter.

One more minor opinion before closing this entry: to stay with a no longer fashionable way of doing art is not non-conformity, but sub-conformity. I came to this conclusion while reading an article (by Jay Nordlinger) on a contemporary American composer Lee Hoiby) I'd never heard of in a recent issue of National Review (which I had one of those free trial offer copies of, I assure you; I would never subscribe to it) who was described as a true non-conformist because he had ignored post-Richard Strauss music. The musical equivalent of the neo-formalists in poetry, and Andrew Wyeth in illumagery. Let me emphasize that sub-conformists can produce great work. As Hoiby may have and Wyeth certainly has. But it's absurd to call them non-conformists.

COMMENTS

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