POETICKS

I got hold of a copy of Vendler’s review of Dove’s Penguin anthology and have now read it.  So far I just have random impressions of it.  One is that Vendler is not nearly as cruel as some posts I’ve read at New-Poetry make her seem.  Certainly she gives much more than just her side on many issues.  For instance, she merely suggests the value of a more exclusive anthology, but gives reasons for other kinds.  She even voices my belief that we already can find canonized works, so don’t need them repeated in an anthology, and I was wrong to take an out-of-context quotation to indicate she herself would rather read an anthology with many more Stevens poems in it and fewer by lessers in it; actually she opined that for a young new-comer- to-poetry would enjoy the anthology more if that were the case.  Basically, she uses the anthology as an excuse to correct Dove about Stevens and other poets.  She takes pains to show that Stevens could be a “tragic poet,” too, not just the aesthete that Dove described him as.  The usual standard nonsense that no work of art is of the highest value unless death is in it.

 

Vendler didn’t seem as arrogant as I thought she might be.  But opinionated, that’s for sure.  Doesn’t think much of Dove as an essayist.  But supports the contention with examples of her flaws, and why they are flaws—like an English teacher with a student’s paper.  The worst thing she did in my view was claim a dead passage by Baraka “turns sentimental, in the manner of E. E. Cummings,” which is crap.  Cummings seems to me too sentimental at times, but his sentimentality was far superior in expression and much different from Baraka’s.  But I’m as sensitive to remarks about Cummings as Vendler is to remarks  about Stevens.  Needless to say, I didn’t change my mind about how narrow Vendler’s taste is.

 

Oh, like so many members of an establishment, she sneers at the idea that such a thing as an Establishment exists in the world of poetry.  Thinking about the absurdity of that, I realized that I, believe it or not, am a member of a literary establishment, the visual poetry establishment. A tiny, uninfluential establishment, to be sure, but one, nonetheless.  With factions, me fairly high in one, Kenny Goldsmith probably similar high in the other main one.   With people in both factions, others in neither.  Kind of interesting.  In any case, I think it insane to poo poo the idea of a poetry establishment.  No field exists—unless less than a few years old—that lacks an establishment.   Which doesn’t mean they are formal or conscious or conspiracies.  They are just there, almost always with more power than they should have.

 

Diary for 16 November 2011, 2 P.M.: today, as usual, I felt sluggish all morning.  Generally the skin on my face feels slightly swollen, my eyes tired.  After luch, though, I finally did some work on my book.  A difficult section I’m resting from right now.  It’s going well, but it started confusing me again.  My one previous good bit of work today was mostly mental, most of it carrying on from late last night after I’d gone to bed, and just about all of it due to excellent comments I got at the writer’s group meeting I went to.  It had to do with the hand-out I’d done for the Arts & Humanities Council Exhibition (the “A&H Show”).  I thought I’d written something clear and easy to follow but found out I had not.  I’ve got most of the graphics done that I’ll be using, but none of the revised text although I know pretty fully what I’ll be saying. 

 

8 P.M.  I did a little more work on the book.  I’d jump in and get three or four sentences done, then find I didn’t know what I was talking about.  I’d take a break, realize I’d left out preliminary information, and gone back to type a paragraph on that–only to have the same thing happen again.   I suppose that only happened three times but it didn’t make me feel I was making progress, and I still have to explain the process I began the day hoping to explain.  Should go easier tomorrow, but my tennis team has a match, and who knows what that will do to me.   I won’t mind losing, but I will mind playing lousy, and I’ve been playing exceptionally lousy lately.  Even though my new hip seems fine.