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Hello, Zeitgeist
There’s a rather amazing new Harriet post by Martin Earl that addresses issues similar to those that Adam Fieled has been admirably wrestling with (see my previous post), but from a more analytical perspective.Read More
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Against the Binary
I’ve been reading, off and on, Joseph Harrington’s Poetry and the Public: The Social Form of Modern U.S. Poetics, and it’s made me realize just how trapped we’ve become (me, too) in the structure of the debates over poetry that began with the rise of Modernism. Harrington quotes Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom in particular to show that promoters of Modernism sought to exclude “public interest” from poetry and focus instead on “form and style.” Writers like William Rose Benét and all-but-forgotten regional writers like Gene Stratton-Porter bemoaned Modernism’s elitist spurning of the common reader.Read More
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Openness Contra Gated Communities
Over at “Stoning the Devil,” Adam Fieled has chosen to re-engage via comments on the poems I’ve posted by Philip Levine and Adrienne Rich. He takes me to task for not explicating the poems, but as I told him in his comment stream, “I have no intention of explicating the poems, although I may comment on them in a general way as I continue to post more examples.Read More