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3 May 2005: Today, I'm going into my laziness mode, as I so frequently do, and just repeat what I said in three posts uesterday to New-Poetry about a dumb list of "The 15 Best American Poems of the 20th-Century."
I began with a brief post in which I said that I didn't have much time, so would just say that I wondered if the Brinkley who made the list was David. He would have made the same list, I'm fairly sure--he would have consulted some Harvard professor to find out about Olson (who has a poem on the list). I should think even the worst stasguard at New-Poetry would find it stupid that all the best poems of the century but two (actually three, maybe as many as five) were written before 1950, and the two not, not written long after that.
In my second post, I said I thought such a list should spark a hugely interesting discussion among true students of poetry. Why? Because, among much else, it would get them defining value in poetry, defending their kinds of poetry, perhaps exposing unfairly obscure poets to view, giving others direct or indirect insights into the way they conceive of poetry, arguing the possibility of determing which poems should be on such a list, presenting ideas for better lists, probing the methods of list-makers, critics, reputation-makers, and so on.
I ended with a request for a new word or phrase I thought would be useful. Maybe "immediately pre-contemporary" would be it. "Penultiporary?" What I want is a word that could be used in lists like the Brinkley one to make it honest without a lot of extra words--i.e., allow Brinkley to present a "top 15 penultiporary poems of the 20th-century." "Penultiporary" meaning up to within the last thirty years or so. How about "penulticontempry?" Still bad, but at least improved?
At that point, as I said, I felt tired and stupid, but nevertheless like I was making a terrific contribution to World Culture with my post. I followed it with a dialogue with Richard Dillon:
> Bob, can you place each of these best poems into one or more of your categories?
Lemme think about it. Many problems. One is that I have more than one set of categories. Several sets, some of which interlap and/or are confusingly
unsettled. Right now I'm involved with lineages--as a student/searcher and lit-history hobbyist. Cummings the focus.
>For instance, I'd put Jeffers and Ginsberg into at least one of the
>received lineages from Whitman.
Ginsberg is the contragenteel version of Whitman, for sure. I'm a big fan of Jeffers but haven't read him analytically, nor read him for a while. Frequent long lines like Whitman. Free verse. Visionary. Certainly on one of the lines out of Whitman.
>Also, how do you account the relationship of Eliot and the way his mind worked to make "The Waste Land" to theories of Cubism in your taxonomy?
"Cubism" is problematic for me. Not sure what it is. I think of it as (1) a means of distortion the way impressionism was and (2) showing a subject
from more than one point of view at once. I think of Eliot/Pound as pioneering the jump-cut, not as cubists (and a serious lit-history question for me would be who was the first to make a jump-cut poem in English, and
who the first to make an effective such poem). I don't think you can "see" a subject from two points of view at once in a poem; in the "Wasteland" you see them from two points of view consecutively with no bridge, so it's
disorienting--if you really see any specific subject from two points of view in the poem. Seems to me you get jerked from one scene to another, never seeing any one scene from more than one point of view, but seeing them in a perceptually illogical order. . . .
> Wouldn't Cummings and Eliot share a category?
I hadn't thought so, but maybe they should.
> Can you provide a chart that would check off each poem per category?
I hope to eventually sketch some kind of charting scheme but don't have one yet.
> Possibly, a double helix model of poem lineages could be envisaged to model literary poetries simultaneous evolutions in generations, societies,
ages.
It'd be complex, for sure--certainly not ABCDEF. One interest of mine is in how much effect various poets/poems had on the . . . poetisphere? aside from
influences on individuals.
> Illumination from Yeat's astrology system could be included in this vision.
Dunno 'bout that, Richard.
> As to WCW: most poetry people would vote for "Spring and All" over "Patterson," in my opinion. And, in what categories would you place these two poems?
I think some poem by several of the poets with poems on the list is reasonable, but would have others than the ones chosen--or would throw up my hands at the impossibility of picking out, for instance, Stevens's "best" poem. I'd rate "The Wheelbarrow" Williams's best poem, but am very biased toward minimalism. (So if were list-making, I'd make several, one for each
size of poem, and others.)
>The same one(s)? "Maximus" a co-inhabitant of the category into which "Patterson" is identified?
"Spring and All" would not be in a category with "Paterson," I don't think, but the "Cantos," "Paterson" and Maximus" would have to go together, I would
think.
Okay, off the top of my head, how I'd class the 15 poems according to my Official Taxonomy (which I never can remember in detail):
Number 1: T.S. Eliot, "The Wasteland"
Number 2: Hart Crane, "The Bridge"
Number 3: Allen Ginsburg, "Howl"
Number 4: Langston Hughes, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers"
Number 5: Robert Frost, "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening"
Number 6: Carl Sandburg, "The People, Yes"
Number 7: Ezra Pound, "Pisan Cantos"
Number 8: Wallace Stevens, "The Snow Man"
Number 9: William Carlos Williams, "Patterson"
Number 10: Elizabeth Bishop, "In the Waiting Room"
Number 11: Robert Lowell, "For the Union Dead"
Number 12: e e cummings (sic), "Somewhere I have never traveled, gladly beyond"
Number 13: Gertrude Stein, "Lifting Belly"
Number 14: Robinson Jeffers, "Shine, Perishing Republic"
Number 15: Charles Olson, "The Maximus Poems"
I count Roethke better than all but Stevens with poems on this list (though not as important as Cummings, a tick better a poet). Plath and Sexton shouldn't have poems on it, but I'm surprised they don't. Stein is obviously on because she's a feminist icon.
FOLLOW-UP
After I posted the entry above, Marcus Bales, New-Poetry's main verosopath, posted the following response, which I thought an interesting specimen of insanity, but am also posting so I can inter-pepper it with name-calling and bragging, being as insane in my own way as Bales:
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