Rejecting the Personal

9 Comments

  1. Joseph Hutchison
    Joseph Hutchison July 18, 2010 at 1:49 am .

    Evidently, going by "Anonymous" means you have nothing substantive to say. Dig in, Anon. I agree that you have a lot of work to do.

  2. Anonymous
    Anonymous July 18, 2010 at 12:04 am .

    &quot;a different kind of social struggle from the classroom exercises I imagine Spahr and Clover to have in mind.&quot;<br /><br />Seriously…are you people so uninformed as to think that this is a &quot;school&quot;?<br /><br />Man, do we have a lot of work to do!

  3. Anonymous
    Anonymous July 18, 2010 at 12:01 am .

    &quot;This &quot;95 Cent Skool&quot; repels me from its core goal.&quot;<br /><br />Ok, I hope you stay far, far, away from us then…

  4. Joseph Hutchison
    Joseph Hutchison July 11, 2010 at 6:19 pm .

    I guess I may be hung up on terms. If you eliminate the negative instances from the Spahr/Clover statement, it boils down to this: &quot;Poetry is […] shared social struggle.&quot; I don&#39;t buy it—assuming I understand it correctly. It seems to argue that poetry does not express the personal, and by extension, writing that <i>does</i> express the personal isn&#39;t poetry. This is horseshit.

  5. Lyle Daggett
    Lyle Daggett July 10, 2010 at 4:51 am .

    I believe there doesn&#39;t necessarily need to be a contradiction, or divide, between what is personal or individual in poetry and what is public or (collectively / socially) political in it.<br /><br />The real shortcoming I find in the statement by Spahr and Clover (or what&#39;s excerpted from it here) is the context of academic detachment that surrounds the quote. I actually more or less

  6. Joseph Hutchison
    Joseph Hutchison July 9, 2010 at 8:07 pm .

    I&#39;m with you, Jared, of course, though I&#39;m always leery of &quot;the true purpose of poetry.&quot; Wilfred Owen&#39;s purpose in &quot;Dulce et Decorum Est&quot; would probably have been unimaginable to Horace, whose ode to military virtue Owen ironized in so modern a way. The purposes of poetry change over time, from language to language and culture to culture. It&#39;s the 95 Cent Skool

  7. Tom
    Tom July 9, 2010 at 7:24 pm .

    Err, we &quot;can&#39;t&quot; save each other…. sorry….

  8. Tom
    Tom July 9, 2010 at 7:23 pm .

    I tend to agree with Basho – sweep your own walk, the whole world is clean. We can save each other when we can&#39;t even save ourselves. If anything, I write poetry to save myself….

  9. Jared Stein
    Jared Stein July 9, 2010 at 3:14 pm .

    I am not an academic, either. I&#39;m not even a poet, though I&#39;ve tried enough times to write the stuff. But as a reader, this &quot;95 Cent Skool&quot; repels me from its core goal, epitomized by the proclamation &quot;any poetry which subtracts itself from such [political and intellectual] engagements is no longer of interest&quot;.<br /><br />This repulsion is not just because I may

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